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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-135939022015-10-07T10:54:00.610-07:00The Eastside Viewtravel, eating, reading, theater, music; occasional political remarksCharles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-62779134920102216652015-08-04T10:16:00.001-07:002015-08-04T18:53:19.473-07:00West Edge Opera

•Alban Berg: Lulu.
Jonathan Khuner, music director;
Elkhanah Pulitzer, stage director
seen July 25 and Aug. 2, 2015.
•Laura Kaminsky: As One.
Bryan Nies, music director;
Mark Streshinsky, stage director;
film by Kimberly Reed
seen July 31, 2015.
•Claudio Monteverdi:
Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria.
Gilbert Martinez, music director
Mark Streshinky, stage director
seen Aug. 1, 2015.

Eastside Road, August 3, 2015—
<big>I</big>F OPERA AS WE (I) know it has a future in our country, the oligarchic United States of America, then I think West Edge Opera, headquartered in the culturally forward San Francisco Bay Area of California, is showing the way. The repertory is exploratory; the means are practical and well scaled; the artistic direction is secure and expert. Productions are mounted in various venues, chosen for cost effectiveness, marketing value, and I believe appropriateness to the work in question.

West Edge is an outgrowth, I believe, of Berkeley Opera, founded in that enlightened city some years ago by the Berkeley conductor Jonathan Khuner, a musical genius (in my opinion), heir to a great musical tradition, seasoned opera worker (coach, prompter, conductor), a graceful intellect and a true enthusiast of musical modernism. I've known him, though not well, for many years. I played bass drum in Ravel's La Valse under his direction, many years ago in a community orchestra. I narrated, as a sort of compère, a production of Beethoven's Fidelio under his baton more recently (but again a number of years back). And I recall running into him after a San Francisco Symphony performance of Gurrelieder : when I enthused at the accuracy and spirit of the performance of the long and complex piece he agreed, but noted that a flute note had been transposed an octave in a chord in a loud tutti passage. Khuner is attentive, observant, quick-witted, and utterly modest; his musicians enjoy working with him.

Earlier this year we saw a West Edge concert production of Rossini's Zelmira (reported on this blog in February), and I've already reported here on this month's Lulu, which impressed us so much we bought tickets for a repeat performance yesterday. The result was that we saw the entire summer season, three operas, in three consecutive days, each time driving an hour each way for the experience. And I retain my enthusiasm for the company, and look forward to next year.

That's not to say I thought the run an unqualified success. Laura Kaminsky's As One is not really an opera, I think, but a dramatic song-cycle, cast on two singers and accompanied visually by a film projected onto panels behind them, musically by a string quartet playing busily throughout. The lyrics, by Mark Campbell, in English, are basically a series of more or less dramatic monologues in which the protagonist of the piece evolves from a twelve-year-old boy to a mature woman. The subject matter is gender identity, and in my opinion the most valuable aspect of the subject and its treatment here, after of course the matter of tolerance for individual means of coping with identity and society, is the awareness that in most of us there are moments, awarenesses, and attitudes that are both masculine and feminine as our society has conventionally typified such things.

The two singers who together portrayed the protagonist, Hannah Before and Hannah After, were winning, persuasive, musically secure: mezzosoprano Brenda Patterson and baritone Dan Kempson looked similar enough (stature apart) to portray a single character, and their voices blended seamlessly in the occasional duet and more frequent overlapping solo lines. Their physical acting, too, handled Mark Streshinsky's low-keyed staging persuasively.

There are however two problems with As One : the libretto is pedestrian, more a description of an individual's character than a portrayal; and the music too often lacks — well, edge and character. Not always: I was intrigued by the Janáček-meets-minimalism quality of the opening scene; and the long aria toward the close, rhapsodic in its confrontation at last with Nature (the Norwegian fjords) rather than Society, seemed finally to get off the ground, to soar in vocal skies I normally associate with Richard Strauss and Mahler. In the intervening hour, though, the music was mostly vocal cantilena accompanied by literally descriptive and rhythmically busy string-quartet writing, tonal, consonant, and to my ear aimless.

Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria, known to its Oakland audience simply as Ulysses, is a very different kettle of fish. Premiered in Venice in 1641, it is with the same composer's L'Incoronazione di Poppea one of the oldest operas in the working repertory but not, of course, frequently produced. West Edge proved the error of this, as it was entertaining, often moving, often very funny, and always both interesting and refreshing.

Where As One had been produced in a sort of warehouse nightclub setting (though with conventional row seating and without table service, which would have improved things), Ulisse was mounted on a platform thrust stage, its runways embracing the improvised pit, in an immense former steel-mill in industrial Oakland. This is a long way from the splendors of Renaissance theater, of course; but it did point up the stock theatrics which underlie more evolved theater. Strashinsky's staging made me think from time to time of Shakespeare's mechanicals' production of Piramus and Thisbe; of commedia dell'arte; even of traditional Italian puppet theater.

Opera is classically defined, by Italians at least, as dramma per musica, drama through music. Every member of this cast moved and expressed himself physically with real acting skill, whether dramatic or comic: but the success of the event was above all musical. Monteverdi's vocal lines are superficially not that far from Kaminsky's: cantilena, consonant, generally conservative in dynamic and pitch range. They are very different though in terms of definition, structure, variation of tempo and dynamic; and melodically they have character and contour, steering one's attention rather than lulling it. And the accompaniment, while similarly string-oriented, modest in number, and steady in its support, is refreshing and supple.

Music director Gilbert Martinez, who directs the Berkeley organization MusicSources, Center for Historically Informed Performance, led the pit band from one of its two harpsichords, turning also to a small reed-organ to accompany the angry sea-god Neptune in his two appearances. Otherwise the instrumentation comprised two violins, two violas, a viola da gamba, and most prominent of all harp and theorbo: plucked instruments whose range and resonance supported the singers with great resonance and rich color. (The theorbo, especially the bass theorbo, must be one of the most eloquent inventions of all time.)

Monteverdi's libretto, by Giacamo Badoardo, is generally faithful to Homer's Odyssey, but reduces Penelope's many suitors to three comic characters, their protracted and relentless slaughter to a momentary burlesque. Ulysses's emotional return to his homeland shore, however, and Penelope's poignant constancy and suffering, are quite moving both in Monteverdi's (and Badoardo's) treatment and in this production's performance. Baritone Nikolas Nackley's Ulysses was secure, melodic, often tender; mezzo Sara Couden's contralto-directed voice gave Penelope a grave, innig quality that was very affecting.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the opera is its depiction of the gods, whose interference in human affairs portrays in theatrical terms the inner weaknesses, proclivities, desires, and ambivalences our own time explains through psychology and, increasingly, politics. In this performing edition the action is framed by discussions in which Jupiter, as god in chief, acting at the urging of Minerva, protectress of the Greeks and especially Ulysses, persuades Neptune, who'd favored the Trojans and punished Ulysses for the last twenty years, to let the poor man go home.

Of the three, Minerva is by far the most important, appearing at pivotal moments throughout the drama. The role was brilliantly sung and effectively acted by soprano Kindra Scharich; tenor Gary Rushchman was a pleasant Jupiter; Aaron Sørensen an effective Neptune. Those two were also two of the three suitors, Pisandro and Anationoo, and Sørensen's bass voice was as strong as a buffo as it was dramatic in the villainous role.

Michael Desnoyers was sympathetic as the shepherd Eumete; Johanna Bronk supportive as Telemaco; Jonathan Smucker effective as Anfinomo; Charlotte Goupille Lebret affecting as Melanto. The Leandra Watson's costumes were simple for the most part, decorative in the case of the gods.

Of the three productions, though, it was that of Lulu that was especially impressive. Complex, big in every way, daring in every way, Berg's opera and West Edge's production seemed logical, effortless, inevitable. Both audiences I saw were moved, gripped by the opera and its performance. West Edge is a company to watch, not only for fascinating entertainmemnt for its local audiences, but for what it suggests for the future and for other communities. The great heritage of music theater can be adapted to present needs and resources: it requires nothing more than nerve and talent. Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-3396649795154757502015-07-28T13:06:00.001-07:002015-07-28T13:08:10.466-07:00Lulu

•Alban Berg: Lulu.
West Edge Opera,
Jonathan Khuner, music director;
Elkhanah Pulitzer, stage director
seen in Oakland, California,
July 25, 2015.
repeat performances:
Aug. 2, 2 pm; Aug. 8, 8 pm
information online:

Philip Skinner as Dr. Schön, Emma McNairy as Lulu; Act I of Alban Berg's Lulu.
Photo: Lucille Lawrence

Eastside Road, July 28, 2015—
 We saw Alban Berg's opera Lulu the other night, produced by the East Bay's West Edge Opera in the abandoned Southern Pacific railroad station in Oakland (California). I can only say the event was phenomenal: we were so impressed we immediately bought tickets for a return hearing, this coming Sunday (August 2).

 Berg wrote the opera, his second, between roughly 1930 and 1935, leaving it unfinished at his death. For years it was known only by its first two acts though the third act was virtually complete in short score and much of its orchestration had been completed for the suite Berg had extracted from the opera for concert purposes. Berg's widow refused access to the manuscript, however, and it was only on her death, in 1976, that advances could be made toward realizing a complete performing version of the opera.

 The opera is scored for twelve singers and large orchestra: woodwinds in threes plus saxophone; four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, and tuba; an active six-performer percussion section including vibraphone; important harp and piano parts; and a full string ensemble; a 16-piece off-stage jazz band including banjo (most of these can come from the pit orchestra).

 Many of the vocal roles are quite demanding; the music is written in Berg's version of Schoenberg's "twelve-tone" system and is often dissonant, wide-ranging, and precise; the subject-matter of the opera is dark, violent at times, and discomforting; and Berg's stage directions are carefully calculated and expressed in detail.

 The result, certainly here in California, has been a very limited number of performances and productions, and those I've seen (San Francisco Opera, 1965 with Evelyn Lear; 1971 with Anja Silja) were truncated, rather routine in their staging, and frustrating.

 A pity, because Lulu is one of the great operas of its or any century. On the first level, it's arresting, fascinating, with a "story" that speaks to both its and our time and a score that resourcefully exploits the most fascinating and athletic possibilities of its voices and instruments.

 This first level will leave many of us confused and either fatigued or exhilarated, possibly both. It's a pity many do not go on to explore the work further, as Lulu is as fascinating intellectually — both as a historical document and as a work of art — as it is telling emotionally.

 Perhaps it will become better known now, as in 2009 the Eberhard Kloke, one of two or three composers who have tackled the problem of orchestrating the third act, completed a reduction of Berg's orchestration. West Edge used an orchestra of only twenty musicians: single winds (two clarinets), one percussionist, harp, piano, and nine strings.

 I can think of few opera performances I've seen as impressively rewarding as this Lulu. Every member of the cast brought real intelligence to his role, projecting character and drama both physically and vocally, and looking the role perfectly persuasively. In addition, the voices themselves were marvelous: accurate, the vocal lines nicely phrased, the leaps landing persuasively on pitch, the dynamic contrasts well managed, ensemble singing (and fast-intercut interpolations, which Berg's often conversational style requires) thoughtfully and effectively handled.

 The opera centers of course on its title role, and I can't imagine a better Lulu than Emma McNairy, who sings and acts with utter conviction and fabulous technique. But the rest of the cast is equally successful: Philip Skinner suave and controlling as Schön; Alexander Boyer as the warm, sympathetic, vulnerable Alwa; Buffy Baggott as a tender, at times uncomprehending Geschwitz; Bojan Kneževič as the sinister, shadowy Schigolch; Zachary Altman strutting and cynical as the Animal Trainer, strutting and stupid as the Athlete; and lesser roles were equal, taken by Erin Neff, Joseph Raymond Meyers, Michael Jankosky, Michael Crozier and Audrey Douglass.

 The entire effort was Jonathan Khuner's baby, and he conducted it not only well but apparently effortlessly — having, I'm sure, rehearsed and coached it with precision, economy, and persuasion. His orchestra supported the production with impressive élan.

 And nearly as welcome, in some ways perhaps even more: Elkhanah Pulitzer's stage direction, on Chad Owens's economical and resourceful set (and with Christine Crook's admirable costumes), respected Berg's indications almost to the letter. Opera is supposed to be a total art form, appealing to eye, ear, heart, and brain with an integral, focussed event. Too often stage directors (and the producers who engage them) are willing to subvert the composer and librettist — in the case of Lulu, Berg is both — by superimposing a third artistic vision on an already complex work.

 That did not happen at West Edge, and the result was a Lulu its composer would recognize and, I think, approve enthusiastically. The lagniappe to all this perfection and authenticity was the setting, a huge, brooding, used-up railroad station that seemed to be — visually, architecturally, even acoustically — a metaphor for the ruined first half of the twentieth century; the worn-out, no longer appreciated or maintained shell of what was once an elaborate, beautiful, and even practical accommodation of men and women of all classes of society.

 There's much more to say. I haven't mentioned the admirable film, for example, cunningly structured by Jeremy Knight to accompany Berg's ingenious centerpiece interlude, a forerunner of Robert Wilson's "knee play" device articulating the drama's exposition and calamitous resolution. I haven't mentioned the intelligently translated supertitles, alas too frequently fading out against the buff concrete walls on which they're projected (can the text-stye be changed to "outline"?)

 I haven't made an attempt at presenting the opera itself, which Wikipedia will do for me; and, beyond, George Perle's fine book on the opera; and, for those who can use it, Erwin Stein's masterly piano reduction of the first two acts, available for the downloading online.

 Most unhappily of all I haven't sufficiently sung the praises of conductor, crew, and cast; I don't think I can rise to the task. This was a superb evening of theater, a magnificent interpretation of a masterpiece, a provocative and absorbing performance with what will be, I know, a long-lasting finish. Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-25184154101946457202015-06-08T05:56:00.001-07:002015-06-08T05:56:05.868-07:00Hotels in Italy
Eastside Road, June 7, 2015—

IN A MONTH in Italy, May 6 through June 3, we stayed in thirteen different apartments, hotels, and agriturismi, relying on four sources for suggestions: Airbnb; Booking.com; Agriturismo.it; and previous knowledge. During that time the euro hovered at about $1.20. The most expensive lodging we found was €77, for an apartment with kitchen; a couple of other places were in the neighborhood of $75 to 80 a night; many others were significantly less. I list all below:

Naples and vicinity:

•Parco Eva (Corso Vittorio Emanuele, 167/6, Naples). We were here seven nights, 6-12 May 2015. It is a comfortable apartment with a good-sized sitting room, an almost equally large bedroom, with a small, efficient kitchen separating them. We found the place through Airbnb ("Spacious Apartment in 1900s Palazzo"), and the hosts were charming, helpful, and attentive. The apartment is on the second floor of its building, which is reached from the top (fifth) floor of another building in front; both have elevators, though a few steps must be climbed to get to the first. The building entrance is perhaps a fifty-meter walk up a fairly steep driveway leading from a guarded gate on the busy Corso Vittorio Emanuele, but the apartments are very quiet.
 While the buildings are a good way from the center of the old city — a half hour's leisurely walk, I'd say — one of the three Naples foniculare is a five-minute walk from the gate; it leads down to the Chiaia area, with its shops and restaurants, and up to the rather staid but very rewarding Vomero quarter, from whence another funicular will drop you quickly into the heart of the old city.

A half hour's drive south of Naples will bring you to •La Vecchia Quercia (Via Montevetrano 4, Località Cantina di Campigliano, 84099 San Cipriano Picentino (Salerno); http://www.lavecchiaquercia.it/). We spent one night there, May 13, having remembered it from a stay five years ago; and we found it all we'd recalled and then some: a fine, spacious bedroom with its own little terrace, on a farmstead out in the country, with an excellent dinner and a copious breakfast provided by a gracious, intelligent, cosmopolitan hostess.

Basilicata:

Here we stayed in two agriturismi and one apartment. Nothing could have been more different than the two agriturismi, lodgings on working farms, found through the Italian website Agriturismo.it, which offers a useful iPhone app. •BioAgriturismo Tenuta Montenuovo (Contrada Montenuovo, 85030 Calvera (PZ); +39 0973 198 5022) offered a comfortable but rather bare-bones room, WiFi only in the restaurant dining-room and on its terrace, but an absolutely marvelous dinner and a fine breakfast. (14 May 2015) •Masseria Cardillo (SS 407 via Bassentana km 97.5, 75012 Bernalda (MT); +39 0835 748992; http://www.masseriacardillo.it), on the other hand, gave us a stunning room — huge, with a vaulted brick ceiling, elegant furnishings, and a private terrace with table and chairs. And a public sitting room big as a soccer-field and much more elegant, with fireplaces and groupings of sofas; as well as huge lawns, a pergola, a swimming pool and tennis court. Dinner was good though not as exciting as Tenuta Montenuovo's; and the Roman ruins at Metaponto were conveniently close. (15 May 2015)

In the touristy town of Matera we stayed in •Apartment Casa Tonia (Vicolo Fornaci 7, Matera, 75100; +39 331 1541555), an apartment carved out of a storefront, with a kitchen, sitting room, and bath downstairs, bedroom-loft upstairs — rather an awkward arrangement for an extended stay, I'd think, but reasonably comfortable for a short one. We had trouble finding the place, as our GPS insisted on taking us to Vico Fornaci Vecchi, and we never could determine whether the apartment was on a Vico or a Vicolo. Whatever it is, it's a pedestrian street, but a covered parking garage is nearby. (16 May 2015; Booking.com)

Puglia:

Just when we were wondering where we'd spend the night we noticed a roadside sign advertising •Agriturismo La Crianza (SP per Torchieroto, km. 3, 73018 Squinzano; +39 328 2487622; http://www.agriturismolacrianza.it), not far from Lecce. Our room was so comfortable and the farm so quiiet that we spent two nights here, using the place as a base from which to explore Lecce and even Gallipoli. The breakfast was nothing to write home about; we dined out; I didn't notice any swimming pool in the extensive olive grove; but the people were very nice and our room pleasant and comfortable. (17-18 May 2015)

Lazio and Rome:

On the drive from Puglia to Rome, encouraged by a Slow Food restaurant recommendation, we drove by way of Campobasso, where Booking.com provided us with the •Cascina Garden Hotel (Contrada Tappino 61, Campobasso, 86100, Italy; +39 087 498024). The hotel's high in a hilltop suburb, with parking in its courtyard, a reasonably good breakfast, WiFi in the room, and a comfortable bed. (19 May 2015)

Outside of Rome, not wanting to deal with parking issues, we stayed at another Booking.com suggestion: •Villa Del Patrizio (via di Castelfusano 21, Ostia Antica 00124; +39 06565.57386). The place looked pretty sketchy to me at first, a little like Santa Monica in the 1950s, raffish and unkempt from the outside, with parking on the shoulder of the street; but the one-flight-up room was very nice, with its own little outside terrace, a comfortable bed, clean bath, and good WiFi, and there was a pleasant, cheap little trattoria next door. (20 May 2015)

In Rome itself we had a room from Airbnb ("Bright Room With Balcony Up vatican") in the quiet, primarily residential quarter of Monteverde (Viale di Villa Pamphili, 132 Int. 4, Rome), a big bedroom with balcony, two bathrooms shared with the other three bedrooms (one of which is occupied by the host), with a fine cafe across the street for breakfast but also a well-equipped kitchen for providing our own (and even a simple supper of pasta and salad when we wished). Our host, a young actor, was charming, intelligent, and very helpful, and I'd spend another week here any time. Parking on street; a city bus stop in front of the building. (21-27 May)

Tuscany:

The provincial capital Grosseto provided a convenient overnight on the several-hour drive from Rome to Monferrato, and there we spent the night at the •Grand Hotel Bastiani (Piazza Gioberti 64, 58100 Grosseto; +39 056 420047). This was a real bargain found on Booking.com. The deskclerk told us we'd booked perhaps the most beautiful room in the hotel, a very well maintained and updated old hotel a two-minute walk from the main square and the cathedral in this quiet, walled old city. The room was utterly quiet and very comfortable, handsomely furnished, and had windows on two sides, overlooking the quiet streets. Parking is outside the city wall, a block away except on market day, when you have to park farther off. Fine breakfast, but WiFi didn't reach to our room. (27 May)

Piedmont:

Arriving in Monferrato, near Asti, the day before our extended booking, we crashed in the •B&B La Riviera, via Orlassolo 18, Arignano, Castelnuovo Don Bosco 10020; +39 3332263640) near the small city of Chieri. Our room was again quiet and comfortable, the breakfast decent, the WiFi acceptable, and parking no trouble at all on what seems to be a horse-training estate run by a handsome and intelligent young man who couldn't have been nicer. (28 May, Booking.com)

Our mainstay in Monferrato, though, is the •B&B I Mandorli (Via Troglia 1/3, Cardona di Alfiano Natta; +39.335.6197718; www.imandorli.it). We first stayed here fifteen years ago and have returned several times since. (You can read more about it on my website.) The proprietors, Gabriella and Franco Rampi, are a delightful, thoughtful, humane couple dedicated to an ethical country life. The rooms are quiet, comfortable, beautiful; and the setting is one of the most enchanting landscapes I know. Breakfasts are copious and delicious, and the countryside abounds in good, authentic, traditional restaurants. This will always be one of our favorite places in the world for a relaxing sojourn. (29 May-2 June)

The evening before flying from Torino's airport we stayed in the •Hotel Cascina Di Corte (Via Castellamonte 2, Venaria Reale 10078; +39 01145932783), found through Booking.com and chosen for its location, ten minutes or so from the airport and fifteen minutes or so from a remarkable restaurant. The hotel turned out to be right around the corner from Venaria's amazing Reggio, perhaps Piedmont's equivalent to Versailles, with beautiful, huge gardens. Our room was, again, quiet and comfortable, with a fine bath, quick WiFi, enthusiastic and helpful desk service, and a fine breakfast. (3 June)

Notes on restaurant dining can be found here

Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-32563122976194244852015-06-02T23:23:00.001-07:002015-06-02T23:26:36.139-07:00Placeholder…
Via Toglia, Cardona, June 3, 2015—

<big>A</big> WEEK NOW since I've posted here, and I knew it would be thus: we've been in this hamlet in a tranquil corner of Monferrato, rather a backwater of Piemonte, for a family gathering; twenty-six of us at one point, and there's been neither time nor inclination to ruminate on things.

This morning, though, everything's packed away. We have this one more day in Italy; then fly home. Such transitional moments always leave me… not sad, exactly; I know the best moments will return, and that if they don't I most likely won't know it. Nor are emotions mixed. Such transitional moments put me in a suspended state of mind, observing and experiencing detachedly. I don't enjoy the present, for the most part; I bask in it, as I sit in the sun. To enjoy is to take: to take enjoyment used to be a common phrase, when English-speakers were perhaps both more honest and more discerning than they often are today. To bask is to participate, to merge.

Well, these dozen posts from Italy will have to do for now. I suppose I'll take up the thread again in a few days; I hate to leave you in a Roman tomb, when so many more contemporary conversations are to be shared. Sixteen thousand words isn't bad, if I may congratulate myself; and if you want to know where the last two weeks have taken us, you can find out at Eating Every Day… or by watching Dominique's video…

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Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-32441899411319410732015-05-25T03:15:00.001-07:002015-05-25T03:17:21.912-07:0011: More Ruins
Viale di Villa Pamphili, May 25, 2015
 <big>I</big> WROTE THE OTHER day about the Roman ruins out at Ostia Antica — what must have been quite a big seaport town a couple of thousand years ago. As I noted, I have a fondness for ruins, which resonate with my innate melancholy.

 Ten days ago — it seems longer — we visited Metaponto, now a sleepy beach community on the instep of the Italian boot, but in its day a similarly important Greek seaport. In those days, before the rise of the Roman republic, Magna Graecia — "greater Greece" — extended well beyond the present-day Greek peninsula and islands; it included much of coastal Sicily and Italy. Five years ago we visited the imposing ruins at Paestum, an hour or so south of Naples, again on the coast — I wrote about that visit here. Metaponto was perhaps a similar outpost, possibly not as extensive.

 I don't know anything about ancient history, and it's too late for me to take it up now with any degree of seriousness. This doesn't keep me from meditating, and speculating. These Greek settlements sprang up on the coasts, of course, because the first Greek visitors came by boat, hugging shorelines when possible for any number of reasons.

 The earliest colonizing must have been closest to present-day Greece, on the heel of the Italian peninsula. A couple of days after visiting Metaponto we touched another site, Egnazia, again a seaport. The Greeks apparently never settled very far inland on the Italian peninsula, though they must have profited from mining that went on in the mountains. (The Apennines extend along the length of Italy as far south as Basilicata, which reaches the instep.)

 Were those early Greek settlers of the Italian peninsula anything like the English colonists in New England, I wonder, and were the local Italic people anything like the Mohicans and the Iriquois? I doubt it. The Greeks certainly had an evolved culture, society, and technology; but I think their "values" must have been closer to those intrinsic to Italy than the Pilgrims' were to the native Americans. I don't know how uneasily the Greek within the coastal cities they built, but I doubt that they were raided from the interior. I don't know how they treated the locals who kept to the interior, but they seem not to have the organization or the desire to enslave them. But I could be dead wrong about all this.

 We first visited the ruins at Metaponto about sunset, after the gates to the archaeological park had been locked, and we were disappointed, though we enjoyed the light, the romantic twilight of both the day and the Greek civilization. Next morning the park was open and we walked freely among the exposed ruins. It's a curious place, still a project of active archaeology though at a very slow pace dictated, I suppose, by governmental money.

 Apart from the site itself there isn't a lot to see. A part of the theater has been reconstructed, and a viewing platform allows a modest aerial view from what may have been the height of the highest seats. Part of the façade of one temple has been reconstructed in a curious way, omitting the height of its columns, bringing the lintel (which must have been sixteen or twenty feet above ground level) down to eye level.

 We walked around the site in the morning light, looking at the ground-plans of the temples, at the alignments of what must have been streets, and enjoying the brekkek kekkek of the frogs. We'd been to the small but very interesting museum on site the previous day, where among the sculpture, the ceramics, and the suppositions of the wall-labels I was particularly moved by a pair of dividers, two bronze pointed legs hinged together.

Pythagorus is said to have spent his last years in retirement here; perhaps this instrument was used by a follower. A curious aspect of the ruins is that at least one temple was clearly laid out slightly out of alignment with other, later ones. I didn't think to check my own compass; my impression is that the temples are generally east-west in position. The surviving grids here, as elsewhere — certainly in Paestum — suggest architects and town-planners greatly concerned with proportion and ratio: they intuited, I'm sure, that an orderly town plan contributes to an orderly civil mentality, something our own developers don't seem overly concerned about.

 But where were the fifteen columns still remaining from the Temple of Hera, so prominently displayed in the museum in a series of enlarged engravings and photographs demonstrating the history of archaeological tourism? Nowhere in sight. We walked in some disappointment and confusion back to our car, to find another had just parked next to it. Its driver turned out to be a German-born Canadian, touring such ruins with his wife — they'd just driven all the way from Messina.

 We had a nice long conversation, and he explained that the Temple of Hera was a mile or two away, invisible from this site but not from the highway leading to Taranto. We thanked him and drove out to see it. It too stands completely unprotected on its hilltop — fenced off from adjacent farmland, it's true, but vulnerable, I'd think, to the vagaries of mischievous visitors. An explanatory panel somewhere suggested the site was important in its day as marking the border of the Greek-dominated coastal area, on a road which even then traced the route of the present highway. From this hilltop you look inland toward the mountains, across fields which three thousand years ago yielded crops of wheat and barley.

 It's a melancholy site now, and must have been rather enigmatic even in its day. It reminded me of another such site, Segesta, in Sicily, where a temple and amphitheater look out over coastal farmland much like this. What were the means, I wonder, by which these architects and builders knew of one another, carried the codified plans of these temples, ordered up the stone and scaffolding they needed. How was their society ordered, and how did hoi polloi feel about that ordering.

 <big>W</big>E LINGERED QUIETLY a half hour or so, enjoying these musings, the warm air, the scent of eucalyptus and sea air; and then we drove north to Matera, subject of another dispatch. A day or two later we were on the east-facing coast at Egnazia, an unpleasant modern form of the no more pleasant Greek name Gnathia (the word apparently means "Jaw", and drives from the two points or moles extending into the Adriatic to contain the ancient port). Had we more time I'd have lingered here too, a day or two or three, to investigate; but at present the site seems to be once again abandoned, overgrown, a large expanse of walled-in grassland bordered by endless grove of enormous, ancient olive trees.

 A relatively small area is open for a stroller's inspection, but it is not Greek: it's the Roman necropolis, the area of tombs developed apart, I suppose, from the residential and commercial areas of the city that once was here. The tombs were all raided years ago, of course; their stone ceilings have, most of them, round openings broken through, just big enough for a small man to drop through, with a lamp no doubt, and hand up whatever vases and other objects he can readily lay his hands on.

A few of the tombs can actually be entered now, thanks to steel staircases thoughtfully provided. They are empty, of course; but there are still traces of paint on the stone walls, and niches where vases containing ashes had been placed. You can just stand erect in these tombs, and your head is six feet at least below grade; but light comes in through openings here and there, revealing the sandy beige of the local stone, and the green of moss and lichen where there is moisture.

 A relatively small area is open for a stroller's inspection, but it is not Greek: it's the Roman necropolis, the area of tombs developed apart, I suppose, from the residential and commercial areas of the city that once was here. The tombs were all raided years ago, of course; their stone ceilings have, most of them, round openings broken through, just big enough for a small man to drop through, with a lamp no doubt, and hand up whatever vases and other objects he can readily lay his hands on.

 A few of the tombs can actually be entered now, thanks to steel staircases thoughtfully provided. They are empty, of course; but there are still traces of paint on the stone walls, and niches where vases containing ashes had been placed. You can just stand erect in these tombs, and your head is six feet at least below grade; but light comes in through openings here and there, revealing the sandy beige of the local stone, and the green of moss and lichen where there is moisture.

 You can only — I mean, I can only deal with so much melancholy. I like the musings these visits encourage; I like the idea that certain human values, certain ways of living daily life, cotinue unbroken from the seaports of three thousand years ago to the corporate fattorie of our own time. But it's time, now, to move from Pythagoras to the present.Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-29583901892121822642015-05-24T03:11:00.001-07:002015-05-24T03:11:09.345-07:0010. Agriturismo 3°
Viale Villa Pamphili, Rome, May 24, 2015—
 <big>T</big>O CONTINUE WITH notes on agriturismi, farm holidays in Italy. Our third, also chosen from agriturismo.it, was again very difficult to find, and this time the problem was, I think, Google, whose map led us to a very unpromising building out in the countryside outside the hill town (but they seem all to be hill towns here in Basilicata) of Bernalda. There we had dutifully driven, and found nothing; we drove on through Bernalda, thinking it might lie outside of town a little further up into the hills; but again found nothing.

 Finally Google Maps brought us to this ugly building, quite close to its dusty country road, with a locked cancello through which we say a dooryard littered with broken-down motorbikes, an old car or two, perhaps an abandoned refrigerator, an abandoned washing machine, bits of agricultural junk. No one in sight; not even a dooryard dog.

 We had driven in to Bernalda on an errand: Lindsey wanted an Italian SIM chip for her telephone. Oddly, my telephone rang as we drove into Bernalda: a woman spoke quickly to me in Italian, saying we'd driven too far and had to turn back to get to tonight's agriturismo. How did she know we'd driven too far? How did she know where we were? A total mystery, a vaguely creepy one.

 But it gave me the opportunity of telephoning back. A man answered and described exactly what we must do: return to the main road toward Metaponto, on the coast; follow it to its first fork, turn left there, look for a little blue car…

 So we did that: we found the main road toward Metaponto and took it for what seemed too long a time. Finally we pulled into one of those little roadside pull-outs where drivers stop for a moment to answer the telephone, or a call of Nature, or, in some places, negotiate a service with a professional woman. I noticed a little blue car in this pull-out, and was a little surprised to see it pull away slowly as we began to park. Could this be our little blue car?

 A man's arm appeared through the driver's window, beckoning us to follow, and we did, of course, soon turning across the main road to turn into an unpaved road that led, before long, to a graveled driveway up a hill between forest and olive grove; and then there we were, parking in front of an imposing, handsome, huge, manorial building.

 A smiling man jumped out of his little blue car and gestured to the front door, welcoming us as if we were his best friends, and we stepped into … a mansion. The vaulted brick ceiling arched very high overhead. Big fireplace. Many many leather sofas, arranged for the most part in threes. At the other end, probably sixty feet away, a wall of glass doors leading out to a terrace, then a pergola, then a lawn.

We were shown to our bedroom, an enormous room under its own vaulted brick ceiling, furnished in beautifully polished dark wood, with a big matrimonia double bed, a writing-table and chair, another table at which to have a glass of wine if the weather is inclement — but it isn't, so we take it out on our own private terrace, comfortably seated in wicker chairs.

 Bathroom, of course; armadio, refrigerator. Beautiful linen sheets. Good wi-fi. This is a kind of luxury we are not used to at all, and seems more like a country spa than an agriturismo. Later we are taken up to the swimming pool and tennis courts: if I were forty years younger…

 And it is, in fact, an agriturismo; the tenuta produces wine and olive oil; the salon was in former days a tobacco-drying barn, that's why the iron rings in the ceiling. Vincenzo, the smiling man who'd so helpfully guided us in is a farm worker in the off season, an assistant to the ospiti, the guests, during the tourist season. He is a perfect gentleman, always ready with a smile, patient, sympathetic, helpful, clearly a man who loves his situation.

 Much of this information comes a little at a time, some from Vincenzo himself, some from the rather brisker but still friendly woman who seems to be boss. A few old black-and-white photographs show workers proudly grouped in front of agricultural machinery from, I'd guess, the 1950s; Vincenzo's grandfather and father among them, apparently. Agriturismi, like trattorias, seem to maintain long family histories. I think of the old saw about the down-at-the-heels British squire who takes turns at master and man with his butler; perhaps something like that obtains now in Italy. Fattorie — the word means "farms," but usually, I think, in the sense of largish farms producing not only fruit, vegetables, wheat, olives, grapes, but also jams and conserves, bread, oil, and wine; the value-added products derived from the raw agricultural products from fields, groves, and vineyards — fattorie perhaps have moved from privately owned farms to corporate ownership, to a fair extent subsidized I'm sure, and subsisting on tourism now as much as agriculture, as tourism has become second only to agriculture in the global economy.

 Men like Vincenzo are, then, perhaps a modern equivalent of a bondsman, in a good sense, bonded not by slavery or indenture but by the practical value of having a good job, a fairly secure one, that allows you to enjoy a beautiful and tranquil setting, one you'd never be able to afford as a guest. I suppose the hours are long, but the work does not seem to be grueling.

 There seem to be only four other guests, two women apparently traveling with one man and another who (I overhear this at dinner) is a local agent of some kind, taking them through this part of Italy, showing them sites, hotels, agriturismi, which they will then sell to their own customers, for they are apparently tourist agents of some kind.

 I take you next to _____, I overhear him say in fluent English, in what seems a conspiratorial voice, you know the film ____, it is where it was filmed, there is a hotel accommodates sixteen guests, yo will have it all, no one else has the opportunity, but we must act quickly or we will lose the chance, I show it to you tomorrow, yes?

 There's something vaguely unpleasant about the guy and about his profession; I silently congratulate myself that we move around from hotel to agriturismo more or less blindly, at the mercy of Google and Waze and the iPhone, wasting a lot of time no doubt, missing out on important sites, museums, works of art; but always fascinated by what we find, and at least in my case preferring our own undoubtedly erratic and even mistaken idea of what we're seeing to the overly detailed and commercial interpretation of a professional.

 But I will have things to say later about professors and tourguides, The dinner itself was, alas, while authentic to local cuisine, not as compelling as was the previous night's (which had been, admittedly, a little too rich). You can read about if on the other blog, of course. But the evening, before dinner, had been marvelous; a romantic 19th-century landscape painting of an evening at the site of the Greek ruins at Metaponto, and then our own blue hour from the lawn beyond the pergola…

 •Masseria Cardillo, SS 407 km 97.5, Bernalda; +39 0835 748992Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-17268176982943629512015-05-24T01:31:00.001-07:002015-05-24T01:37:52.728-07:009: Agriturismo, 2°
May 14-24, 2015—
 <big>A</big> CLOSED IRON GATE; no doorbell to push. Three or four meters to the side, though, I notice a piece of paper posted to the mailbox, with a telephone number. By the time I call, though, we've been noticed; I see a man a hundred feet or so down the road at what must be the gate-opening sensor; the gate swings open, we drive down the smoothly graded gravel road, swing to the left along the oval turnaround, park as indicated in front of a long low row of guest rooms attached to a handsome stucco building with a fine rosebush covering part of the wall.

 Couldn't differ more from yesterday's agriturismo. Where La Vecchia Quercia was serene and stately, Tenuta Montenuovo is clearly a work in progress, and a working farm. We've driven in through the olive grove, some of the trees severely cut back and thinned out recently. The house is halfway down hill from the gate in what seems to be a gentle hollow protected by forest from prevailing winds and the noise of the road (not that there's any traffic); it faces away from its driveway, ninety degrees left, and down the slope in front of it I see a couple of horses standing peacefully near their quarters, one tethered, the other at liberty.

 We're shown into a big darkened dining room — interiors in this country seem always to be dimly lit, perhaps to save electricity, perhaps to keep cool in a climate given to heat. I suppose you could seat forty or fifty diners at these tables. There's a short bar down the left side; the man who showed us in immediately offered us a coffee, making it in one of those new-fangled capsule espresso machines. He borrowed our passports for a few minutes — Italian hotels still have to register their guests with the government — and then gave us the key to room 4.

 A nice enough room: double bed; armoire; writing-table; bathroom with shower. Enough sockets to power the laptop and telephone chargers. (I always carry a three-outlet adapter.) No view, though; strictly utilitarian. What do all the guests do, during what must be a busy enough season to reward all these accommodations? Well, I see a swimming pool, obviously not used at the moment; there's a big flat area intended presumably for campers and tents. We learn later there are many walking trails in the area. Apparently Basilicata is developing a tourist economy; its hills and mountains a welcome respite from the heat of Campania and Puglia.

 The room is quite basic but comfortable, and there's a picnic table out in front of the dining room that finds the promised WiFi. (Wireless connectivity is increasingly important to us, and almost never present in rooms, only in lobbies, dining rooms, and the like.)

 Getting here, now that had been a problem. We chose the place from an Internet site, agriturismo.it, which has a very handy iPhone app. Both show very clearly that the Tenuta is in the country, just outside the località of Carbone, but they also give Calvera as the site; so there we drove, up a steep road through a couple of switchbacks to the town, which had that rather closed aspect so many back-country villages project — not unfriendly, but a little bit guarded. We parked on the town square and walked to the only bar-café that was open. Three men in their forties, in work clothes, sat on the terrace between the doorway and the street; they'd been talking among themselves, but broke off as we approached. Salve, I said, the usual Italian for "hello", and they nodded back, then resumed their loud conversation.

 Inside a tired-looking (or possibly merely harassed) woman was cleaning something up behind the bar. We ordered coffees,, then returned to the terrace, where I pulled a plastic chair off a pile of them, nested together, and set it at the one table that had a chair. Before long another fellow came along, limping up to the terrace with a dog on a leash, and yanked his own chair free from the pile. The other men acknowledged him but showed no interest in him. A man drove a very noisy tractor up the street. Five o'clock hung heavily in the air. We drank our coffee and consulted our iPhones.

 The tractor came back down the street, now pulling a trailer filled with what looked like compost. It sounded like the engine was about to throw a connecting rod. The clanking was really ominous. I looked at the man with the dog, who looked back at me, barely moving a facial muscle to show he knew what I was thinking. He looked toward the tractor, back at me, almost invisibly shook his head right, then left, and touched an earlobe.

 We finished our coffee and paid; I replaced the chair I'd taken; we checked our information more closely, and drove down out of Calvera toward the river. Soon enough we saw a pannello advertising the Tenuta, and we followed its pointer, past a locked gate and up the road toward Carbone. On one side of the road, vineyards just leafing out, each vine with its wooden stake crowned with a rusty upside-down tin can, to protect it from the rain I suppose or to discourage perching birds. On the other side, olive groves, many of the trees very severely cut back. Before long we realized that locked gate must have been our evening's hotel, and we turned back.

 Giovanni told me the next day — I'm so nosy; I ask so many questions — that the place was ten years old; that that was his father-in-law working in the garden. Oh ho: so he married into the place. Well, why not. I asked how it was going. Well enough, he said. You don't get rich, but it's a good life. I was in Florence a few years, he added, I made more money there, but who wants to live like that?

 His wife Carmela cooked our dinner and brought it to our table. A small but substantial woman with a full round face and dimples and a ready smile, she was dressed in whites and always, every time we saw her, wore a professional white cook's cap, not a toque but a close-fitting brimless cap like those that gas-station attendants used to wear, when they weren't slipped under their belts.

 And what a cook she turned out to be! I write about most of our dinners on my other blog, and this year I started maintaining a list of restaurants we've been to. I decided not to attempt to assign "grades" to restaurants, partly in the spirit of equality, partly to evade the responsibility, mostly because one's taste in restaurants is inescapably subjective — but some of them are so memorable, for one reason or another, that I single them out. That's likely to happen with this one.

Next morning, after a solid night's sleep, Giovanni was on a back-hoe, leveling a good-sized garden site already protected from the elements by an enormous canopy. This would supply tomatoes, zucchini, and eggplants, he explained. I looked around the place a little more, and discovered a good-sized swimming pool I'd overlooked the previous evening, not that I have a suit with me. I think in season this must be well attended, this place. People come for cycling and walking, Giovanni said; many come from Puglia, where they don't have hills and forests of their own. As we would discover, in the next few days… •Bioagriturismo Tenuta Montenuovo, 85030 Calvera (PZ), Italy; +39 338.6368133Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-13340770548469049662015-05-23T22:54:00.001-07:002015-05-23T22:54:07.601-07:008: Don't worry. No problem.
Viale di Villa Pamphili, May 21, 2015
 <big>Y</big>ES, A LITTLE BIT behind in the dispatches. And even in the private journal, if you want to know. Been busy. Yesterday, for example, we arrived in the city of Rome, in Monteverde, a nice residential quarter vaguely southwest (as I believe, but I'll check that out sometime later) of Trastevere, about ten in the morning, in plenty of time, as I thought, to return the rental car to the Hertz office at the main train station.

 The very nice fellow at our apartment counseled me against that attempt. E tutto bloccato in centro città, he said; the center of the city is completely blocked. So I thought I'd return it to another office. The fellow who rented me the car a week ago, in Naples, said I could return it to any Rome office. So let's do it.

 But which office, and where would it be? There must be one in Trastevere, I thought, but looking up the addresses of the various offices on the internet turned up no answers. Many possibilities for clicking into an endless help loop, but no addresses. Phone numbers, but all of them answered by machines, most of them babbling away in melodious lilting Italian impossible for a non-native-speaker to comprehend.

 Finally I followed Google Maps to the nearest office, on the Via Pellegrino Matteucci, over in the Ostiense district, near the Ostiense train station, where the improbable Piramide is. I'll flesh this out later, I suppose, when I'm home, and have little else to do. The Piramide is very interesting; I'd like to tell you about it. But just now we're driving up the Via Pellegrino Matteucci looking for — ah, there it is — the familiar Hertz yellow, no doubt copyright — no place to park — but there's a truck double-parked, its four-way flashers going; I'll just stop behind it, leave the engine running, set my own four-way flasher —

 And I dodge through traffic across the street to the Hertz office, to find it locked up, obviously closed. But careful inspection reveals a piece of paper in the window: they'e merely moved a few doors down the street. I run down there: it too is closed, locked tight, no one in evidence, even though it's a good half hour short of noon, and they're supposed to be open until 12:30.

 But here again is another piece of paper, advising me that I can return the car to a parking garage up the street. I run back to the car, punch the address of the garage into Waze (thank Hermes I've noted the address; thank Hermes Waze is always ready for another chore), and off we go, up the street a long way, sharp right, up another street, sharp right over a very unlikely modern viaduct across I don't know what, sharp right down the Ostiense, ah, there it is, a shabby entrance to a nondescript parking garage, no one in sight, no signs, certainly no familiar Hertz yellow.

 Nessuno? I call, Italian for Anybody here? And finally a man answers, walking slowly over toward us. I explain everything to him in my very much broken Italian: the car is due at noon, at the cenrtal office at the train station; the central city is completely blocked; the man in Naples told me I could return it to any Rome Hertz office, here it is, what more must I do.

 He looked at me impassively. Do you have a contract? I hand that question to my secretary-consort, who hands me a paper, which I hand him, though I see, my heart sinking, that it is not a contract, merely a printout of an e-mail from the second-party online car-rental I use. This is not a contract, the man points out, in beautiful, clear Italian, though he is certainly not a native Italian, he obviously has a good component of Japanese ancestry. Rome is a cosmopolitan city.

 No, I said, but it is what I give you. I look at my secretary. That's all we have, she says. That's all we have, I tell him.

 He has begun walking around the car in that familiar pace, looking for dents and scratches. It's perfect, I say, just as we rented it. Yes, he says, No problem. Don't worry. Was the wheel cover like that? I don't know, I say; I'm sure it was.

 Fine, he says, that's all, thank you. What, I ask: do't I have to sign something, or perhaps you should sign something for me? Don't worry, he says; everything is fine. No problem.

 So we walk out of the garage, me carrying a pair of shoes we'd forgotten to unload from the car back at our apartment, and think about what to do next, while at the front of my mind the gears are turning: there was no sign that that was Hertz; I have nothing signed; the paper with the address of the parking garage — was that taped to the inside of the Hertz office window, or the outside? How simple it would be to tape notices like that to windows of closed offices, wait for people to bring cars to you, and then drive to, say, oh, I don't know, Istanbul, or Moscow, or Brussels, or any other European city, maybe sell the car along the way…

 The hell with it. As I've already told my other blog, we stopped in at Perilli for lunch, which made everything a whole lot better, and then took a bus to a piazza near our apartment, and walked the rest of the way, and sacked out for the afternoon.

 The first half of this month in Italy has run its course; the second half will be quite different. We will no longer be alone, just the two of us; we will be with friends and relatives. Tomorrow we attend the graduation of a granddaughter from the American University in Rome; her parents are here as well. In a few more days we'll rent another car, if Hertz hasn't thrown us in jail, and drive up to Piemonte for a festive weekend with many friends and relatives. My Italian will get evern worse for lack of need for it; I'll be hearing English everywhere.

 The Roman episode will be odd, too. We're almost not in Rome; Monteverde is quite a different quarter from Trastevere, where we've stayed before, not to say the historic center on the other side of the river. I feel restless. My son-in-law messages me: he's getting a haircut: would I like to go along? Well, yes, I need one. I walk up to meet him; then we walk down to Trastevere to a shop he's been told about — but, predictably, it's closed.

 But I have my own favorite shop, where I've twice had very good haircuts, at 44, Piazza del Teatro di Pompeo, near the site of Julius Caesar's assassination — these few yards of street mean so much to me, from just a few visits but over so many years.

 We settle into the shop. The barber looks familiar, He tells me he's been there thirty years. I first came here for a haircut, I tell him, in 1988; I remember a boy who swept the floor meticulously…

 The owner's son, he said; yes, not completely… well…

 That's the one, I say. And is he…

 Oh he's fine, the barber tells me. The owner is retired; I own the shop now. I was second barber then. And the boy? He's, well, retired, too, living in a home…

 Pavel and I emerge a half hour later, both looking like George Clooney. Well, I look like Clooney's father, and Pavel looks like a friend of Clooney's, I tell him. We walk back across the Ponte Sisto, across Trastevere the short way, up the Janiculum to Fran's apartment. I buy a couple of bottles of wine and a bottle of grappa, and we have dinner in her apartment, three generations of us, us oldtimers who in our twenties would never have dreamed we'd ever be in Rome, our daughter and her husband who grew up in a prosperous, secure world; our granddaughter and her boy friend who are questing their way in a world none of us could have imagined.Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-77716280094239536272015-05-20T11:50:00.001-07:002015-05-25T01:37:45.546-07:007. Dignity in futility
Ostia Antica, May 20, 2015
<big>T</big>HE INTENTION WAS GOOD: to make this a journal of a month in Italy, posting every day or two, writing about the roads, the hotels, the mood, the people we meet, the landscape, whatever comes to mind. But any loyal reader there may be will have noticed I've been silent for the last five days, and that this brings the total number of posts up to seven though we've been here twice that many days. And, worse, as far as I'm concerned, I still haven't brought you up to date on the agriturismi visited.

 It's certainly not because there's been nothing to write about. We've visited three or four Greek and Roman ruins, any number of fascinating buildings, and the three agriturismi. We've seen the trulli of Alberobello and the cave-houses of Matera. We've driven across the heel of the Italian boot twice, and today drove through another part of Italy we've never seen. I've taken, let's see, eleven hundred photos, and that doesn't count today.

 For a long time I've noticed that you can either experience things or write about things; it's hard to do both simultaneously. I do keep a journal of sorts, but it's mainly a record of hotel addresses, expenses, the occasional note on a thing or person seen. I rely on my increasingly unreliable memory and, of course, the photos, which function as an aide-memoire and, thanks to the iPhone's GPS, a record of when we were where. Or where we were when.

 For the moment I"ll just write a bit about today, since, tired though I am, it's fairly fresh in my mind. Last night's hotel was a pleasant one, a couple of kilometers out of town and above the city (Campobasso), but its breakfast was one of the least adequate we've had: no bread, only cake and jam-tarts (though I have to say I do like those apricot jam crostate), and about the worst coffee we've had, with far too much milk and that, I suspect, the long-playing kind. So we got out fairly quickly and hit the road, using the iPhone app Waze to guide us to tonight's digs.

 Waze works amazingly well here in Italy, though it's a good idea to verify the address before you enter it. In another post I'll try to remember to tell you what happened when we relied on it to get us to our quarters in the Basilicata. I set it to avoid toll roads, which adds an hour to a three-hour drive, and takes you through any number of roundabouts and sharp turns, and small towns and industrial areas: but you drive slower, saving fuel; and you save a lot of money in tolls.

 I've always liked driving in Italy — whether in cities or in the country. You make use of all the road, and so do the other drivers. You'll come up behind someone driving 40 kilometers per hour in a 90 kmh zone, usually though not always because that's all his wretched car will do on the climb. It's a two-lane road, and someone's probably coming toward you from the other direction. But the slow guy moves over toward the shoulder and you pass, knowing the fellow coming at you will also move over to crowd the shoulder, and everyone agrees this makes the world better for both fast drivers and slow ones.

 The countryside after Campobasso was really beautiful; rather wild at first, with hardly any villages or buildings, just forest, occasional patches of snow lingering on the peaks of the Appeninines, now and then a manicured field. There are red poppies everywhere, and surprising pinkish morning-glories, and miscellaneous other flowers and thistles decorating the landscape. I forget who it was that said flowering plants prove the existence of God: I don't agree, out of principle, but I know what he meant. Evolution could have come up with something else, and I suppose it might have been nearly as nice; but I'm happy there are flowers.

 We stopped at a little roadside bar in Cervaro, near Frosinone, just over the border from Molise in Lazio, for our second coffee, to subdue the lingering taste of the breakfast coffee. The croissants were surprisingly good, and the cappuccinos were too. I listened to the incomprehensible conversation of two or three guys lounging in the doorway behind me, and took a picture of the view and my companion at the table; and posted the photo to Facebook, where now seventeen people have "liked" it — and then, before you could say Jack Robinson, came a "friend" request from someone I'd never heard of (I always ignore such requests) and it turned out to be the proprietor of the place!

 Facebook and TripAdvisor, like Waze, have changed the way we travel. Word gets out about things much quicker now, and while the "critics" and "reviews" on TripAdvisor, to take only one example, are often far from reliable (and too often downright crude or snarky), Facebook, since it lets people one really knows trade information and comments and photos, can be very helpful. (It's also a quick way to show people what you've been seeing, which I find, so far, a blog is not very good at.)

 We drove through the Rome suburbs, some of them, and the increasing traffic, nosing our way through merges that would be impossible at home, finding our way across highways and the tangenziale, finally parking right in front of tonight's bed-and-breakfast. Only to find it closed, and a sign on the door saying it would be open between six and ten pm. So we drove out to the beach, reasoning there'd be something there to eat even though it was nearly three o'clock; and sure enough there was a fish-and-chips shop that was quite adequate — you'll be able to read about it over at my other blog, if you like.

 And then we turned to the real purpose of tonight's stay in this implausible town: the ruins of the Roman port city. I had no idea how extensive they were, and how easily the visitor (once he's paid a healthy admission, which must keep out the careless) can walk at liberty amont the tombs and streets and ruins of apartments and public buildings. I'm attracted to these ruins because I like daily life, I like the sense that apart from technology humans seem always to have the same desires and the same approach to satisfying them, I like the confirmation ruins give that nothing lasts least of all human aspiration, and that there is a real dignity in futility. Ruins confirm in me my innate melancholy.

 But all the time we were walking among the pines and junipers of Ostia Antica, eavesdropping on French and Dutch and Italian tourists, conversing with a clutch of schoolchildren from Normandy implausibly dressed (and so were there adult teachers) in Roman tunics and sandals and headgear — all that time at the back of my mind I was worrying about tonight's lodging. The place had looked pretty sketchy when i parked there first.

 We returned at six-thirty, and the iron gate outside the compound was still locked. A note permanently pasted nearby gave a phone number; I called it; a man said Ten Minutes! Ten Minutes! Yes? and I looked at the time and sat back and relaxed, well, a bit. And within ten minutes he was there, and led me through the gate, through a cluttered driveway sort of affair, and up a flight of outside stairs to the entrance of what had at one time apparently been a private home.

 And you know? Our room is really nice, with the necessary bed and chairs, the armoire, good and fast WiFi, a perfectly adequate bathroom, and our own balcony, where I sit at a table typing out this dispatch. It's twilight now; friendly dogs are barking about the end of their day; a blackbird is uncoiling his liquid song. I'm about ready for something to eat and a good night's sleep before turning in our car tomorrow and resuming my engagement with Rome.Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-81636180609393773102015-05-15T23:09:00.001-07:002015-05-15T23:09:11.993-07:005. Agriturismi: La Vecchia Quercia (Salerno)
Metaponto, Basilicata, May 15, 2015—
 <big>Y</big>OU MAY HAVE NOTICED, constant reader, if you're there, that there was until today no chapter five in this series of travel dispatches from Italy. I had intended to write it four days ago, on the subject of Churches and Castles; but one thing and another. Not to bore you with excuses.

 (I had intended a Chapter Seven, as well, on the subject of Flâner; and that too has gone by the wayside, though it will doubtless emerge when I least expect it.)

 So, as Lucky says in Beckett's indispensable play, I resume. We have spent the last three days driving from one place to the next, settling for the night in an agriturismo, eating dinner, sleeping, and then recapitulating the next day. This has taken us from Napoli to, so far, Metaponto, on the northernmost point of the Gulf of Taranto, the instep of the Italian boot.

 The three chosen agriturismi have been quite different from one another, though all with two things in common: unforgettable, personable, helpful, truly sympathetic personnel; and settings close to the agricultural terrain. I begin, then with the first of these.

 We first found the B&B La Vecchia Quercia in a travel article in, I believe, the New York Times&thinsp, when we were touring around by car for a few days from Caserta to Erculaneo to Paestum to the Amalfi cost. We decided more or less impetuously, as we tend to do, to give it a try, and we found it delightful. The setting is quite a few kilometri off the beaten path, back up in the woods at the edge of a regional park, wooded and hilly, though still agricultural — in fact on the edge of an apparently important vignoble, Montevetrano. (I have yet to taste their wines: a tribute to the more ordinary house wines offered at this table.)

 We were back day before yesterday, five years later almost to the day. The woman in charge, Anna Imparato, looked at me closely but apparently did not recognize me: but she remembered my companion instantly. And warmly.

 We were shown to our room: large, comfortable, with its own little terrace, and adjoining the lawn under the lemon grove. Beyond the structure containing our suite and the adjacent one, much the same as I recall since we stayed in it five years ago, and containing also an apartment on an upper storey, there's a stretch of garden dominated by an amazing old mulberry tree, certainly a meter in diameter at the base, the trunk hollowed out, but the canopy full and thriving.

 Our view looks west over agricultural land, and truth to tell it is a workaday landscape, but everything here is so well tended, planted and distributed with so astute and gifted an eye, that every detail confirms a kind of spirituality, a graceful marriage of idea and achievement, concept and realization. I love the place, because I love the values and intent of its direction.

 I won't discuss dinner — I've done that over at Eating Every Day. But I must discuss our hostess, which is something I don't often do here; I don't like writing about real people; they are always so much bigger, more complex, more interesting than I can convey, and then there's always the fear one won't please them with one's report. But, fact is, such people have chosen a public life, and for better or worse (probably the latter), I am by training and, I suppose, by nature a journalist; I like to write about what I see, if only to fix it in mind…
 Signora Imparata is perhaps seventy, well-built, handsome. She carries herself well: her posture is elegant but not stiff; her gestures are gentle but expressive. When she listens to you she looks at you frankly and directly, with interest; she has an impressive way of focussing on what you intend to say. Every part of her bearing is quiet, well regulated. When her well-formed hands move gently and gracefully apart, turning at the wrists to let the palms face one another, her fingers spread just a little, as if instead of punctuating a statement as to how something is she is carrying a small invisible but probably beautiful and fragile container of fact.

 My mother was a very good women, but very strict, she said. I was sent to a religious school in Rome, where we learned to hide our attractions to things that were forbidden. I was very unhappy, not because of that, but because I could never learn to turn the sheet under properly when making the bed. It was a very strict upbringing: we walked with pieces of wood on our shoulders, and our heads, and another piece of wood thrust down behind the neck, to teach the proper way to carry ourselves.

 My sister was a gifted musician; she practiced the piano ten or eleven hours a day; she lived for music and the piano. But when she asked if she could be a concertista, No, she was told, young women do not do that. We weren't taught anything about money, about business. A frl lived on her parents' income until she married, and of course she did marry; then she lived on her husband's money. She was taught to run a household, to be cultural, to manage that side of life; no more.

 But we knew the kitchen, the garden; plants; everything about the household. We knew sewing. When a double sheet — which was always very fine, highest quality — when there was a thin place coming, or it split; then we cut it and made it into single sheets. Then still smaller: serviettes; bandages. Finally it was only big enough for blowing the nose. But it was used as long as possible.

This was not because we were poor; far from it. It was simply the way things were done; it was a respect you paid to the things you had, to their quality. It was a completely different way of living. Can that way of living come back? No; I don't think so. And yet, who knows, perhaps it will. Perhaps in the cycle of things it will come back; we will lose interest in life as it is lived now, we will realize the fullness of life consists in work, in attention, in appreciation of things as they are, of life as it comes to us.

 When we began here, the people who help us asked why there were so many forks at the table; why does everyone at the table have two glasses, that is not the way we do, we have one fork, we need only one glass, but we quietly continued to put the proper number of forks and glasses at the settings because that is how we were taught things are done, and now I notice the people who help us they too at home have one glass for water another for wine; they too have the correct forks.

 Signora Imparato — few people can be so well named: imparato means "taught" — speaks passable English and, I think, fairly fluent French, as well as Italian. The night we were there there was a Dutch couple, say twenty years younger than us, staying there; she and they spoke English together, and got on well. Her sister — perhaps the former pianist, perhaps another — has become an apparently well-recognized winemaker, and lives next door. There's another woman who, I believe, cooks and certainly serves the breakfasts, which are copious and tasty. I suppose we will return; I can't imagine driving past Salerno without stopping; the bed is so comfortable, the room so delightful, the dinner so rewarding, the conversation so pleasant.

 The morning we left a young man was mowing the lawn under the lemon trees. Another couple of workmen were getting the small swimming pool ready for the season. Everything here is in order, calm, reassuring, pleasing. Nothing is out of balance. The contrast with the busy city that is Naples couldn't be bigger — and yet Anna loves Naples, it has heart, as she says; it's a performance; one forgives it its faults for its warmth and generosity and spectacle. These are exactly the virtues of La Vecchia Quercia, minus spectacle I suppose: but there comes a time one wants tranquility, even gentility, to enjoy the emergence of utilitarian sufficiency into beauty and order..

 •La Vecchia Quercia, Via Montevetrano 4, Località Cantina di Campigliano, San Cipriano Picentino (Salerno)

 Writing like this appears in three of my books: Roman Letters, two month-long stays in Rome; Mostly Spain, a month touring Madrid and Andalucia; Venice: and the idea of permanence, reflections on a couple of month-long sojourns in that city. Look for them in iBooks or simply by clicking on the title.Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-4833820503041336692015-05-13T13:26:00.001-07:002015-05-13T23:35:31.883-07:006. Pizza e gelato!

Antica Pizzeria da Michele

Corso Vitt. Emanuele, Napoli, 12 May 2015—
<big>O</big>F COURSE I WRITE about our meals just about every day; I've been doing that for years, at Eating Every Day. And so I rarely write about eating here, on the theory that this blog is reserved for really consequential matters, requiring really serious attention on my part, and even more dedication from you, gentle reader, if you're there.

 But it's time to record the results of our short but scientific survey of pizza and gelato, matters of considerable significance to certain members of my family and therefore perhaps of more general interest. Naples is considered, I'm not sure why, the origin of pizza. I think this may be partly because of its importance as a center of Allied occupation in 1944, after the first Allied invasion of the European mainland, at Anzio, not that far from here. Pizza was of course already well established in Naples at that time, a staple at a time when foodstuffs were in short supply, and very tasty to the American G.I., who was heartily tired of G.I. fare by then, I'm sure.

 Pizza is of course nothing more than flatbread, and flatbread's been around for millenia. There isn't a Mediterranean cuisine that lack it; hasn't been since recorded culinary history. (You can probably find pictorial representations of it from prehistoric times, if you're academically inclined.) It's absurd to think that Naples "invented" pizza, any more than China "invented" pasta, pace Marco Polo.

 But Naples is proud of its pizza, proud and even a bit purist. At Da Michele, for example, two large signs on the walls present literary — well, poetic — admonitions on the subject:

 Don Michele
 cu l'aglio, l'uoglie e arecate
oppure a pummarola
pare na cosa facile
ma a pizza e' na parola

n'ce vo na pasta morbida
s'adda sape' n.furna'
o gusto i chi a prepare
pe nun ve n'tusseca'

a pizza e' nata a napule
ma poche indo' mestiere
ve ponne da' o' piacere
i farvela mangia'

surtanto don michele
che' fino pasticciere
ve fa na pizza spendida
ca ve fa cunzula'
 —A. Galante
 A Margarita
 a quanto sta' o benessere
a gente penza a spennere
e mo' pure o chiu' povero
o siente e cumanna'

voglio una pizza a vongole
chiena i funghette e cozzeche
cu gamberetti e ostriche
d' 'o mare e sta citta'

al centro poi ce voglio
'n'uovo fatto alla cocca
e co liquore stok
l'avita annaffia'

quando sentenne st'ordine
ce vena cca na stizza
pensanne ma sti pizze
songo papocchie o che'	 ca se rispetta a regola
facenna a vera pizza
ch'ella ch'e' nata a napule
quase cient' anne fa

questa ricetta antica
se chiamma margarita
ca quanno e' fatta a arte
po gli 'n'anza a nu re

percio' nun i cercate
sti pizze cumplicate
ca fanne male a sacca
e u stommaco pati'

—G. Esposito

A. Galante's poem is little more than an ode to Michele, the eponymous original pizzaiolo of one of the most highly touted pizzerie in Naples: "pizza was born in Naples, but few are given the mastery… above all don Michele, whose pastry skill developed that splendid pizza…"

 But G. Esposito's lines, from what little I can make out from the napolitano dialect, go further into the question. It's not pizza that the Neapolitans invented, but authentic pizza, which has only four ingredients: the dough, the tomato sauce, the garlic, the oregano. When you're poor, you may dream of clams, mushrooms, oysters, shrimp; a cooked egg, salt-doc broth, and all that: but you make do with what you have, and what you have, if you're lucky, is tomatos, garlic, and oregano. And just as well: because those complicated pizzas will only wreck your bladder and leave your stomach swollen.

 Well: I'm a little confused here. Esposito is writing about Pizza Margherita, and it's aready unnecessarily complicate, secondo me, in my opinion, because it adds cheese to the classic Pizza Marinara, the tomato-garlic-oregano pizza. There's a story there, too, of course: Queen Margherita was slumming one day in Naples, and wanted a pizza: the pizzaiolo, thinking she deserved something special, entirely new, added dollops of mozzarella to the classic (and in fact only) version, thus adding white to the otherwise red and (barely) green colors. Red, white, and green are of course the national colors of Italy; Margherita was the first queen of the newly unified nation; the result was as patriotic as Verdi. (Vittorio Emanuele Re d'Italia; get it?) So jingoism interferes with the true course of cultural necessities, like opera and cuisine.

 In any case while my companion reached into other corners of menus, even as far as salt-cod-and-mushroom pizza, I remained true to scientific principle, comparing apples only with apples, oranges with oranges. I have tasted only pizze Marinara, and when it's come to gelato, I've been loyal to fior di latte (crema when there is no latte) and limone. And the results have been absorbing.

 •7 May: Pizzeria da Michele, Via Giuseppe Martucci, 93; +39 081 1957 6887: The pizza menu here begins with Marinara and Margherita, and while there are other, more complicated combinations listed, we of course went no farther. We split a Marinara "Maxi", about twenty inches across says my Contessa, beautifully leopard-spotted on its bottom side, a little soupy in the Neopolitan style, edgy and pointed with good tomato flavor and delicate oregano and garlic. Oh: there was basil involved too. Not authentic.

 •8 May: Starita, Via Materdei 27,28; +39 081 5573682: This one was perhaps just a tad better. I think the reason was the nicely cooked little basil leaves — okay, maybe that is authentic — and the sweet thoughtful tiny chunks of garlic. The tomato was a little mellower than yesterday's, which is nice, though I did also like, just as much, the assertiveness of yesterday's: each version is first-rate, smooth, rich, nicely balanced.

 My Contessa, always fond of baccalà, ordered the "stock" pizza: stockaffisa, the Italian version of dried cod, black olives, capers, garlic, chopped parsley, and cherry tomatoes. It was very very good, delicious in fact, an inspired combination. The cod, or baccalà, or brandade, or whatever you like to call it, was very smooth, deep-flavored, set off nicely by the perfect tomatoes. The waiter told me it was strictly local, made here in Naples from locally caught merluzzo. I want to believe that, and I think I do.

 •11 May: L'Antica Pizzeria da Michele, Via Cesare Sersale, 1/3; +39 081 553 9204: Here there are only two pizzas: Marinara, which is tomato sauce, a little garlic, and oregano — no basil! — and Margherita, which adds mozzarella to the mix. And there are three sizes: small, medium, large. To drink you choose Coca-Cola or beer or water. The pizza arrived almost immediately. I think perhaps it arrives too quickly, and while I'm no pizzaiolo I think the pizza may not have been cooked long enough. The bottom of the crust is nicely blackened, but the spots are too big, leaving whiter spots that also seem too big. I'm sure the oven was up to temperature, but as we left I watched the pizzaoli at work: there were two working the one rather large oven, one shoving uncooked pizzas in, the other dragging cooked ones out. It's probably a mistake to go to da Michele during rush hour.

 The tomato sauce was fine, though perhaps not as dense as at Starita. The dough was very hard to cut with the table knives we were given. (I should explain: in Naples one eats one's pizza with knife and fork, and they arrive at table innocent of any kind of pre-cutting: you don't lift a wedge already cut and eat it from your hand. Non si fa: it isn't done.) Anywhere else this would be a marvelous pizza. In my opinion, here in Naples, it wasn't quite up to its closest competitor — and I do like a glass of red wine with my pizza!

 Fabio, whose restaurant Partenope we went to one evening, up in Vomero, has an uncle who is a pizzaiolo. They were both horrified when I admitted that we'd had our first pizza here. Yes, Starita and the real (Antica Pizzeria) da Michele, they're competent enough. But Fabio says, reasonably since it's in the family, the best pizza in Naples is made by his uncle, at Acunzo Pizzeria Vomero (via. B. Covenzio 4/6; Vomero Napoli; +39 081.0491868). Unfortunately for one reason or another we never got there. Next time.
<big>O</big>N THE SUBJECT of gelato I'll have less to say. In spite of our best intentions, I only sampled four or five gelaterie, maybe six; and so irresponsible am I I took proper note of only four, and even then misplaced the name of one — which is of little consequence.

 We've been sampling gelato for years, and I have developed my own approach, which is to taste the simplest flavors, some might say the blandest, if I'm intent on making comparisons. I love certain other, bolder flavors and textures. Perhaps my favorite is riso, gelato based on rice custard, but that is now very rarely found. It used to be common: I recall delicious ones in Venice and in the small southern Tuscan town Capalbio. Those days are apparently gone.

 I like chocolate, of course, and some nut-based gelati, and licorice, and some really odd ones like the tobacco-flavored and whisky-flavored gelati you can find on Rome, where we'll be in a week or so. But when I'm on a scientific errand I stay with two flavors: Crema and Fior di latte. Crema is what Americans might think of as "French vanilla," except that there's little if any vanilla, and it isn't French. It's simply a cream-based custard, and it can be absolutely wonderful.

 Fior di latte — well, I've never been sure what that is. It's lighter than Crema, of course; it's undoubtedly flavored with a bit of vanilla; but principally it is milk. My companion could tell me a lot more about this, if I asked her, but she's reading the newspaper. In Naples I never saw Crema, so I abandoned my usual procedure and substituted Limone for it, thinking of Carlo Ponti and his marvelous song "Gelato a limon."

 We began the survey our second day in Naples, at a shop that came readily to hand after our pizza at Starita. Gelosità, like most of the other gelaterie sampled, is a chain of shops; a franchise in fact: but we'd happened upon the mother ship, you might say, and the young woman who served me said, when I asked, that the gelati were all made on the spot.

 I had Fior di latte and Limone, and thought them both good, but not exceptional. The flavors were clean and direct, the textures smooth with no graininess at all; but the finish seemed short to me — but then, I'd just eaten a very good pizza.

 The next day we put my new friend Fabio to the test. We'd read that one of the best shops in Naples was Fantasia Gelati, but when I mentioned that to him on our walkabout in Vomero, he said — quietly and without contradiction, as is his style — yes, many people like it; personally, I prefer (and he pointed to it, across the street) Casa Infante.

 Both are on the Piazza Vanvitelli, and there we were: so we went first to Casa Infante, where I had Fior di latte and Limone, and my companion substituted the Nocciole (hazelnut) for Limone.. Then to Fantasia for the same, my companion by now abstaining altogether. She thought the Limone slightly better at Fantasia, but I disagree: it was less intensely flavored at Casa Infante, but it was also deeper, less superficial, and had a cleaner finish. And the Fior di latte was much creamier at Casa Infante. I have to agree with Fabio.

 A couple of days later we found ourselves walking past the one shop on everyone's list that is apparently one of its kind, not a chain, not having opened a branch office anywhere. On the other hand, Gay-Odin is not simply a gelateria; it is primarily a cioccolateria specializing in chocolate candies of various kinds, running its gelato operation on the side.

 Nothing marginal about its quality, though. I thought the Fior di latte more or less average, but the average is very high; it was easily up to those I'd had earlier. And the Limone was smooth, clean, rich; a very beautiful thing; a semi-frozen lemon custard managing the difficult marriage of citrus and cream and egg with no awkwardness at all.

 As I say, the average in Naples is high. We stopped at an ordinary run-of-the-mill commercial gelateria with no pretensions to artigianalità that I could see, across the street from the Duomo — strange that no art gelateria had staked out real estate here; perhaps it's simply too expensive — where my two gelati, you can guess what flavors, were as good as anyone could decently demand. Not breathtakingly superb, perhaps, as I think Casa Infante and Gay-Odin can achieve. But very very good.
 Writing like this appears in three of my books: Roman Letters, two month-long stays in Rome; Mostly Spain, a month touring Madrid and Andalucia; Venice: and the idea of permanence, reflections on a couple of month-long sojourns in Venice. Look for them in iBooks or simply by clicking on the title.Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-47827951231429069642015-05-12T09:52:00.001-07:002015-05-12T09:59:14.257-07:004: Gates and gatekeepers
Corso Vittorio Emanuele, May 12, 2015—
 <big>O</big>UR BUILDING is on the right in the photo, to the right of the entrance to the funicular: the second-highest, just below the rounded one. The more handsome because somewhat older one just in front of it, with rounded bays at its corner, is the one we take the elevator through, bottom floor to top, to get to the front door of our building. Each of these palazzi, as the Italian quaintly calls apartment buildings, has its concierge, and at the cancello at the street, where the residents drive in, there's another, a guard really, not a concierge, who sees to it, presumably, that none but residents and visiting professionals come in through the gate.

 Well, not the gate, really. There is a gate, but it seems always to be open; instead, the vehicular entrance is barred by a simple barrier, a pole hinged at one end that lifts from its crutch when someone needs to drive in. What the Dutch call a slagboom, a striking pole, like those you see in parking garages. There's a pedestrian gate there at the cancello as well, also perpetually open as far as I can see, though I haven't been out late at night.

 Our concierge is a woman who sits at the window of the front door of her apartment on the ground floor next to the elevator. It's the only apartment front door with a window. She is visible from the waist up, and she is always on the telephone, but she always takes not of our arrival or departure, usually with a smile. If she doesn't smile she must be preoccupied with her telephone convesation; perhaps the news isn't so good. It can't be terribly bad, though, because her default expression seems relaxed and benign.

 The day we arrived everyone cautioned us on the proper use of the elevators. The cage has a door, of course, on each level, to prevent one's falling into the slevator shaft; and the car has a door, split into two leaves vertically, I suppose to keep one's limbs from harm while the car's in motion. If all these doors aren't closed quite shut, the elevator does not operate. If we were to leave a door the slightest bit ajar when leaving on the top level, a person at the bottom would have to climb a number of flights to get the elevator. By the time she got there she wouldn't need it, of course, but she'd be in a temper.

 I knew that, of course, I wasn't born yesterday. Nevertheless the elevator was stuck on our floor shortly after our arrival. I know it couldn't have been my fault, but the concierge wasn't convinced. I heard her toiling up the stairs and calling out, and opened our front door, just three steps from the elevator, and saw the problem immediately, and clicked the door shut shut shut. She began lecturing me, in Italian of course, and I countered that since I knew perfectly well how the whole thing worked it couldn't possibly have been me who left the door ever so slightly not completely shut. But she wasn't buying.

 Still she smiles now when she sees us. I've never seen the concierge in the front building, and there is no window on any apartment door on its ground floor; but I know she's there, probably looking at a video monitor while making her telephone calls. Perhaps she isn't presentable, and the apartment direction — a committee, I think — prefers to keep her hidden; or perhaps the idea is to keep residents and visitors in a state of uncertainty. But we all know she's there, and act accordingly; though I never know in which direction to smile as I enter; the camera, if present, is well hidden.

 I like the men in the little cabin at the cancello. Their big front window is always open and they frequently stand in the roadway in front of their cabin. They'll call a cab for you, if you seem incapable of doing it yourself even though they've provided you with the number. They aways say Buon giorno or Buona sera, to let you know they've seen you and recognized you as permissible. Usually there's only one man, but sometimes, especially apparently at noon and the next couple of hours, there are two, perhaps to keep one another company at lunchtime.

 The other day as we walked out an alarm was going off somewhere, a particularly annoying one, and they were discussing this between themselves, and with anyone who chanced by. The question was, where was the offending alarm? One of our buildings, here at Parco Eva, Corso Vittorio Emanuele 167, or one of the buildings in the adjacent park, whose name I do not know and whose number has escaped my attention? If one of ours, clearly it was their responsibility; and clearly this troubled them; it would be very nice if we could determine the alarme was going off next door.

 An old man, even older than I I think, was convinced the alarm was coming from one of our buildings, perhaps even his own. He kept pointing up and to the left. I walked up the roadway, cupped hands behind my ears, and slowly turned my head from side to side as I walked, like a traveling radar antenna; and I was certain the irritating warble came from next door. Hard to be sure, I admitted; there were many surfaces reflecting the sound; the place is full of echoes. It's a bit like wandering among rocky landscapes in the Alps, where sometimes you must listen very intently to figure out which direction a voice is coming from, or a distant cowbell; and sometimes you begin to understand the irritation a peasant must have felt at the mischievous ventriloquy practiced by local gnomes and sprites.

 We were standing there waiting for a taxi we'd called — we'd called the one at 8888, and while we waited many 2222s and even a 545 or two drove past, empty. Surely, I thought, only four 2222s would come by in the time one 8888 would take, but it wasn't that simple; no arithmetical processes here. And in fact a 545 picked us up, and when I told hm we'd called an 8888 he said it didn't really matter; he was going by anyway.

 By then the alarm had begun to weaken, as if realizing no one was going to take it seriously, it was a bore and an annoyance, nothing more. And when we returned, hours later, it was quiet.

 Lst night, though, just as I'd fallen asleep, there was a tremendous series of explosions down the hill in front of our building. I went to the window to see an amazing display of fireworks, nothing going very high into the sky, but many things going off nearly at once, say three storeys above the street. It reminded me of the scene in Les vacances de Hulot, when all the fireworks in a storage shed are accidentally set off at once. I actually saw that happen a number of years ago at a private party in the French countryside on Bastille Day, when as night fell the host was so drunk he decided to set off all his feux d'artifices simultaneously, with the result that it was soon over and everyone was laughing at the consequent anticlimax.

 Today I asked the watchman at the cancello what it had all been about, and he shrugged: some Saint's day, he speculated, or perhaps a wedding. If a wedding, I said, the bride must have been a little nervous. They always are, the watchman replied.
 Writing like this appears in three of my books: Roman Letters, two month-long stays in Rome; Mostly Spain, a month touring Madrid and Andalucia; Venice: and the idea of permanence, reflections on a couple of month-long sojourns in Venice. Look for them in iBooks or simply by clicking on the title. Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-73646945038886501122015-05-12T00:44:00.001-07:002015-05-12T23:57:04.441-07:003: FunicularCorso Vittorio Emanuele, May 9, 2015—
<big>B</big>ECAUSE STEEL CABLE has a certain elasticity, the car comes to its stop very slowly: then, once stopped, drifts slowly backward, then forward, gradually shortening its drift until completely at rest. In the meantime a few riders have got out, others have entered. The Funicular is like a diagonal elevator, bringing riders from the Piazza Amedeo in Chiaio at the bottom to the via Domenico Cimarosa in Vomero at the top.

 Chiaio and Vomero are districts, I suppose you would say, of Naples; newer extensions of the old city, less scruffy (especially Vomero), but not really suburbs, but also not really quartiere — what the French call quartiers and we anglophones know as neighborhoods: they are too large for that, and if Naples were to disappear, as other cities at the foot of Vesuvius have been known to do, then both Chiaio (which would probably disappear too, engulfed by a tsunami of one kind or another) and Vomero (which might not, as it is considerably higher) would go on independently perfectly well, though with neither train nor air terminal.

 As I say, Vomero is quite higher, and our Funicular, which is called Chiaia, is really quite useful for getting up there. Or, for that matter, down to Chiaia. Our street, the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, starts off down in Napoli like any busy thoroughfare; but up in our neighborhood it takes on the nature of a corniche, winding along relatively flat on the face of what amounts to a cliff. It makes me think of the Avenue de Cimiez in Nice, or Euclid Avenue in Berkeley: it links two or three quite different zones and aspects of the city, taking on the qualities of each as it does, while respecting geography and, paradoxically, facilitating the handling of traffic.

 The Napolitani know how to build on the sides of hills. On the faces of cliffs, even. I've mentioned the geography of our own apartment building, one of seven I think in our own little residential neighborhood. It is a vertical geography, measured by stair-steps — two hundred twenty-one — or elevators — five floors in one, two in the other. And then the sloping ramp of the private road. According to the app on my iPhone, there is 180 feet difference in elevation between our apartment (which itself is nearly four hundred feet above sea level) and the cancello, where our private street disgorges onto the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. And the cancello is far above the Piazza Amedeo, and far below the via Dominico Cimarosa up in Vomero. (I'll check those elevations later, if I think to.)

 As trams or streetcars inspired suburbanization in the United States shortly after electrification, say in the early years of the 20th century, by facilitating fast and inexpensive commutes downtown, so these funiculars — there are three of them in Naples — opened up the heights. Vomero, the plateau well above Naples, had been agricultural; its name is said to derive from an old Italian word for "ploughshare", and it's still called "the broccoli patch," a little derisively, a little fondly. It reminds me of Prati, the Roman district just north of the Vatican, a wealthy bourgeois district that was built up early in the 20th century, when apparently much of Italy, or her cities at any rate, enjoyed a degree of complacent prosperity. (A good fictional portrait of the result, in terms of social and family lassitude, can be found in Alberto Moravia's wonderful first novel, Gli indifferenti, translated most recently into English as Time of Indifference.)

 Well: one euro buys you a ticket on the funicular (a euro and a half if you forget to buy it ahead, at a tabacchii or edicula), and they arrive every ten minutes throughout the day, and take you in no time from Corso Vittorio Emanuele where we live down to the bustling Piazza Amedeo, and in only a slightly longer time (because there is one stop between) up to the via Domenico Cimarosa in Vomero. And Vomero is where I spent the morning yesterday.

 The evening before we'd dined at a newish restaurant, Partenope, an enchanting little place, and we'd conversed with one of the owners, and hearing of our interest in the restaurant business he invited me to join him in the morning as he went about his rounds shopping for Partenope's kitchen. I was quick to agree.

 Fabio is a young man, nearing forty I'd say, lean and handsome, good-humored and I think patient but with a watchful eye, a good thing in his profession. He took me first, of course, to his favorite cafe, around the corner from his restaurant; and there I had the finest macchiato I've ever tasted, rich, dense, chocolatey without a trace of chocolate, balanced, aromatic. And then we hit the markets.

 We went first to the local covered market where there was a small fish stall. He introduced me to the proprietor, a man about his age: His grandfather sold fish to my grandfather, he explained. There were small displays — shallow buckets, I suppose you'd have to say — of tiny clams, of mussels, squid, a few eels, and the cleanest, most delicate, shiniest and tiniest alici, fresh anchovies, that I've run into. (We'd had some, fried, the evening before: unbelievably delicate and sweet.)

 From there, a walk through the Piazza Vanvitelli toward a small street market, open every morning Fabio said, where he looked over the vegetables on offer and engaged in a short conversation whose import was subtler than my defective Italian could catch. We left empty-handed, but that didn't surprise me; he hadn't brought anything from the fishmonger either — I suppose deliveries are made later in the day.

 Next, the enoteca. The proprietor, Danilo Marra, opened a little late this morning; no one seemed to mind, or think it irregular. He has an astute selection of wine from other Italian provinces and an imposing selection of spirits and apéritifs, but what was really impressive was his selection of local wines, and his knowledge of them. Well, not impressive, perhaps; after all, it's his métier. I know nothing of these wines, and was surprised that Ischia, for example, barely four by five miles yet housing sixty thousand inhabitants, is a locally important wine producer.

 Danilo and Fabio were immersed in a long, subtle, and apparently serious conversation, and I stepped outside, where a lean man in faded blue worker's coveralls, with a sallow but cheerful face, was carefully but slowly sweeping up a few scattered cigarette butts — yes, there's still a bit of smoking in Italy, though only out of doors, at least in public. We had a short imperfect conversation. Finding I was from California he mentioned he'd been to Florida for a few months, visiting someone in St. Augustine, but hadn't found work, and in any case wasn't able to extend his visa. Why were the Americans so afraid of foreigners, he wondered; wasn't there plenty there for all? I tried to explain the present mentality about immigrants, foreigners, and terrorists, but he'd been persuaded that Americans are brave and generous, and felt, I think, that his problem in Florida had somehow been his own fault.

 Walking on with Fabio I asked about the man. How does he make a living; what does he do when not sweeping Danilo's doorstep? Fabio shrugged. Is he, I asked tentatively, a factotum? Oh yes, Fabio quickly agreed; and I thought of men like him I'd seen years ago in Sicily, directing me to a space in a parking lot, say, or helping with a package, or something, and then gracefully and subtly — interesting how often that word is necessary to describe an ordinary event on an Italian sidewalk — extending a hand, palm up, for a small coin one will never miss.

 There's no embarrassment in these moments, these transactions, and if a request for a coin is denied, there has seemed to me to be no ill will. We walked past an old woman sitting in a doorway with a shallow cardboard tray: in it, a few coins. Fabio automatically found a coin in his pocket — I wasn't able to see its denomination — and dropped it into the tray.

 Of course it's his neighborhood; he lives here, maintains his business here. We stepped into the Friggitoria Vomera, where his mother stood behind the display case, and an uncle was frying graffe, big doughnut-like pastries, so light and delicate you almost forget you've eaten one, and want to have another. Another uncle is pizzaiolo in a family pizzeria.

 We ended our tour in the basement kitchen of a pastaficio, a short, muscular fellow with an amazingly sunny smile, who stood at a big basin of polenta, stirring it with a wooden pole whose upper end was held loosely in a hole cut out of a metal strap extending a short way from the wall. The smooth yellow polenta bubbled softly. and he left off stirring for a while, moving to a work-table on which lay a pile of cooked rice. He tore a good-sized chunk of rice away, slammed it on the table a few times, then stretched it out between his hands, slammed it back down again, and began rolling it into a cylindrical loaf, from which he tore off pieces the size of a small orange, shaping them into balls. Ah: these would be arancini, perhaps to be finished upstairs at the Friggitoria.

 Fabio looked at me conspiratorially: You have to see this, he said, and led me down to another room where the pastaficio had somehow preceded us. A huge mound of dough was on the work-table. Again he stretched and shaped a cylinder of dough, a slim one this time, maybe an inch in diameter, and then in a marvelous quick ballet of hands continued rolling it back and forth with his two hands, pinching off a piece with his left hand, rolling it into a stubby cylinder with both hands, and flipping it into one of three shallow pans with the right. Croquettes, Fabio explained, and the pastaficio looked up and smiled his radiant smile, never breaking stride, and the pieces flew speedily and unerringly into the pans…

 Later in the day I returned to Vomero, with my companion this time, and we inspected the vast and sober Castel Sant'Elmo: but that's a story for another day. I'll only report now that on our walk back to the funicular we encountered the pastaficio striding briskly in our direction. He flashed me his sunny smile…
 Writing like this appears in three of my books: Roman Letters, two month-long stays in Rome; Mostly Spain, a month touring Madrid and Andalucia; Venice: and the idea of permanence, reflections on a couple of month-long sojourns in Venice. Look for them in iBooks or simply by clicking on the title.Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-9783191103325442072015-05-11T00:47:00.001-07:002015-05-11T00:53:32.738-07:002: Museo with children
Corso Vittorio Emanuele, May 8, 2015—
 <big>I</big> DO NOT NECESSARILY recommend you see the Museo Nazionale Archeologico this way. A four-year-old girl makes a capricious and unpredictable tourguide. But there was little choice: a granddaughter had impulsively flown into town with her husband and two children — the other only six months old or so — and this was our one chance to connect with them before they continued, by bus and train, to Pompeii, the Amalfi coast, Rome, Florence, Venice, the Cinqueterre, and back to Naples to fly home. (All in three weeks. Ah, the stamina and impetuosity of youth.)

 We met at the entrance to the Museo, exchanged kisses, and quickly agreed sitting down to breakfast trumped culture for the moment. I wanted to introduce them to cappuccino and cornetti, that curious Italian version of the croissant. But first, a lesson in crossing the busy street.

 Down the via S. Teresa delgi Scalzi sped the cars, motorcycles, mopeds, taxis, the occasional small truck, the more occasional bus. It's a major thoroughfare, and everyone's in a major hurry. I don't think Saint Teresa of the Barefoot would approve. I've been in her apartment in Avila; I've seen her papers, covered with her small neat handwriting. She seems a very orderly, very much focussed woman.

 But there is order and focus to this flow of furious traffic. Years ago an acquaintance of ours was posted to a job in Rome, where after only a week or two his wife announced she hated the city, didn't understand the Italians, had nothing to occupy her own time, and wanted to leave. He was unsure: she wanted to leave Rome, merely, or him? But just in time the shipping container arrived with all the things they'd be needing for the next couple of years, among them their little car.

 I'm going for a drive, she told her dubious husband, and off she drove. After a few hours he began to worry, but she turned up in time for dinner. I love this city, she burst out; now I understand the Italians; I'm going for a drive every day. It's wonderful. You look straight ahead, you're aware of things around you, you never look back, you take the space you need and give the rest to the others, it's like a river, it flows.

 And that is how you cross a busy street full of fast-moving traffic. The four-year-old riding my chest, her arms around my neck, I stepped into the street with firm intent, eyes right, announcing my purpose to any oncoming driver. Of course one does not step in front of a car too near. The idea is to allow oncoming drivers the time to prepare, to make the slight accommodation needed to adapt their trajectory to the one you are evidently following.

 The indispensable requirement is clarity of purpose. One mustn't hesitate; hesitation or uncertainty communicates unpredictability to the oncoming driver. If you don't know for certain what you're doing next, how can he? How then will he know whether to swerve gently left or right, to accelerate slightly or to let up? And how will his resulting uncertainty affect the cars and taxis and motorbikes around him?

 Crossing the street like S. Teresa degli Scarpi is like dancing on a crowded floor. You're all going in the same general direction, though each couple does its own maneuvers within the flow. One clumsy man, one drunk or stumblebum, and the whole thing clogs, slows down; dancers collide; good humor gives way to annoyance; what had been a beautiful poem of motion turns dull and prosaic. (Though perhaps comic, if you don't have money of your own in the game.)

 Same thing in the little bar across the street. Oh, it's very small, I said with some disappointment, as we approached it: but one of the baristas was at the doorway, No no, he said, not at all, plenty of room. And patrons standing at the bar shifted a bit, others on stools at the ledge moved a little, or finished their coffees and left.

 All of them smiled at the children. Touring Italy with a small child is a delight; the children open virtually every door. The customers beamed at them; the baristas beamed at them. The little middleaged lady who inevitably stands between the cash till and the pastry display, keeping track of the customers and the cornetti, she beamed too, and smiled at the baristas' beaming, and with her own smiling eyes seemed to conduct the little gestures and repositionings and facial expressions that made the whole thing work.

 But we couldn't put off the Museo forever: one must have Purpose as well as pleasure when touring. So we practiced our street-crossing once again, the four-year-old riding the prow, her mother following with the baby strapped to her front, the father next carrying the push-stroller with one hand, the bundles of baby necessities with the other; my own constant companion last, glancing up the street with some apprehension I think; and finally we were back at the Museo, just behind a pack of schoolchildren all wearing yellow baseball caps and little backpacks full of pencils, papers, pamphlets, and perhaps the occasional piece of candy.

 The ground floor of the Museo was given over to a celebration in stone of the power and presence of the Caesars. Huge blank-eyed statues of men and women, men mostly, standing mostly, rarely clothed with anything but a beach-towel carelessly thrown over a shoulder, stood at respectful distances from one another, on boxes just about as high as a four-year-old's eyes. I wondered what she would make of all these bare toes, not to mention the apparatuses a few feet higher. I pointed out the toes, and she counted them on two or three bare marble feet: but you could see that she quickly lost interest in these presences.

 I think children prefer the living to the dead, and to the representation too. It's interaction theat interests and rewards them. No matter how powerful and imposing a presence the statue suggests — and after all that's the intent of these monuments — the intended effect only takes place within a context in which the onlooker knows and (preferably) subscribes to the power relationship. It's a political maneuver; and it's an abstract politics at work.

 Children intuitively understand politics, Jupiter knows; they engage in it themselves as soon as they can, before they're six months old they're manipulating parents and baristas with chortles, whimpers, dimples and scorn. But they like these relationships confirmed by interaction. They are immediately interested in other babies, who look back at them; in greatgrandfathers, who carry them about and otherwise indulge them; in baristas and museum attendants, who seem to worship them, at least casually. But stone caesars mean nothing to them, because they don't change their expressions. Children won't buy these politics: you have to train abstract respect and submission into them.

 So the four-year-old tugged at me, urging me from one vast, high-ceilinged, rather empty room to the next; and I enjoyed the tour, taking in not the statuary (though I did glance at it, and admired a portrait-sculpture of a rare matron amongst all these men) but the physical qualities of the rooms — their proportions, their shapes, their light and shadow, even their subtle aromas of stone, plaster, occasional fugitive scents.

 And, of course, their acoustics: four-year-olds delight in the sounds of voices, and delight in contributing their own. In fact I think she shared my delight in each of these aspects of the rooms, and enjoyed my own enjoyment. Old men have much in common with four-year-olds, who are quick to recognize this — we have a common opposition (though a gentle one) to the generations in between. Our purpose is pleasure; their pleasure is purpose.

 (And yet I think there is purpose in our pleasure. Awareness of space — of proportion of ceiling-height to floor area, of the fall of light through window and doorway, of the timing of echoes and the directionality of sound — is imperative to survival skills in, say, crossing the via S. T. d. Sc. This is probably why a delight in spatial games is instinctual in young animals.)

 Of course there was the problem of the others. Not other museumgoers; there were few of them — the yellow baseball caps had moved on, immersed in their training in cultural politics no doubt. And certainly not the occasional museum guard, who looked up from his newspaper or telefonino or meditation with a quick recognition of the presence of a child, triggering the immediate Italian response of a smile, a beaming awareness of innocence and enthusiasm, qualities long since exchanged for a stable position within the social context.

 No: it was my own family I was thinking about: my granddaughter, her husband, my wife, all dispersed in various galleries, looking I imagined more assiduously for one another than at these presences. Four-year-old seemed entranced with staircases, tugging me up one, down another; I thought with a little concern of my contessa's gimpy ginocchio, for she'd hurt her knee the other day and was having trouble with all this walking and stair-climbing.

 When her father hove into view I had the idea of suggesting she hide from him, and she immediately found a niche behind newel-post and balustrade where she stood motionless for quite a long time. She'd learned after all from this statuary. From then on, for quite a while, she was no trouble at all: as we moved from one room of Pompeiian frescos to the next she preceded us, finding a hiding place in a corner or behind the rare bench, in some cases even hiding in plain sight by sitting motionless.

 Still, these frescos, not to mention their bilingual explanatory labels, require time and attention, and our guide was after all impatient and, let's face it, a greater responsibility. And her family had an agenda: having just finished the flight from New York to Naples, they had their train to catch to the bus that would take them to the night's lodging. I cast another regretful glance at a particularly interesting painting, of a king arrested in shock at seeing the one-sandalled hero who would be his overthrowing; and we walked back through the rooms filled with Caesars, and out into the bright day; and down to the Metro station, where we sent these four youngsters on their way. Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-78445280009001724742015-05-07T14:39:00.001-07:002015-05-07T14:42:51.316-07:00A month in Italy: arrival in Naples
Corso Vittorio Emanuele, May 7, 2015—
 A month in Italy 1: Arrival in Naples <big>I</big>T WAS A LONG flight, and tiring. Nearly eighty, we don't do this as easily as we once did. Older, slower, and stupider: let me begin by cataloguing the mistakes:

 First, we got the departure time of our bus to the San Francisco airport wrong by fifteen minutes, and arrived at the terminal to watch the bus depart. Thankfully our neighbor down the hill is a good sport. She immediately followed the bus onto the highway, drove past its next stop to give us time to get ahead of it, and set us down the next stop down the road — an extra 25 or 30 miles for her, and an extra forty minutes, but a game-saver for us.

 Then, when we finally boarded our plane, we took the wrong seats, as a very polite German fellow pointed out. We should have taken the row ahead. Oh well, I suggested, we're already settled; wouldn't you like simply to exchange seats? But no, they would not; it was a question of the names attached to the seats. Well, I suggested, we could exchange names as well. Mine is Charles; what is yours? Florian, the fellow said, a bit confused. A nice name, I responded; I can imagine you mightn't want to exchange. So up and moved, and resettled everything.

 The flight was long and straightforward. Lufthansa's Airbuses have good in-flight entertainment, but I chose only a Mozart album to listen to before dinner. What a performance! I've since downloaded it to hear it again: the young Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang playing the first and fifth concerti and, with the Ukrainian violist Maxim Rysanovk, the Sinfonia Concertante. I have rarely been so moved — perhaps the surroundings contributed, but a second and third hearing confirm what I felt in the airplane: delicacy, restraint, pacing, intonation, everything was just what you'd want. Silences and thoughtfulness in the slow movement; short notes throughout; very little vibrato. Marvelous.

 Arrived in the unfriendly architecture of the unfortunately named MUC, the Munich airport, we found our way through mazes partitioned with glass walls sometimes functioning as mirrors, at other times revealing equally frustrated and confused travelers in the hall we need to be in but cannot reach for lack of doorways. Passport control. Yet another security check, and this time I cannot untie my iPhone case from my beltloop. If I only had my pocketknife, I point out to the security guy, I could cut it; but of course you will not let me carry my pocketknife, so I can't. With good Bavarian humor he chuckled and bent to untie the knot, while I stood old, slow, and stupid, like an aging horse being unharnessed for perhaps the final time.

 On the airplane finally we again of course sat in the wrong row. This time names and such no longer seemed to matter: we were with Italians, not Germans; and not only Italians, but southern Italians, and good humor and resignation prevailed. As did the generous Lufthansa alcohol policy: free and repeated.

 Then there was the taxi situation in Naples. Our plane landed on time, but our checked bags were the last off the airplane, and by the time we got outside there was a long line at the taxi rank. Cabs came and went with remarkable efficiency at first, but as we drew nearer the head of the line there were fewer taxis. One tried to cut into the line by driving wrong way through the gate, and a delicious Neapolitan argument broke out. The Italian word is imbroglio, and it is often useful.

 We'd been warned not to ride with a driver who forgets there is a standard fare to our quarter, Chiaia: twenty-three euros. Doesn't apply with this consideration and another, our driver said in loud and quick Italian, mentioning baggage, distances, the time of night (it was nearly midnight), and other matters far too complex for my flagging interest. Thirty-five euros, he said, not twenty-three; it's thirty-five euros now to Chiaia.

 Can't be, I said pointedly, it's twenty-three. No, he said: thirty-five. Well, thirty. I countered with twenty-five, and we settled at twenty-eight. In the end, of course, I gave him a twenty and two fives, and got no change. But what can you do? I asked his name: Rosario.

 WE LIKE OUR APARTMENT. We chose it for its location: not in the historical center, but close enough by public transportation, or, when we're up to it, a twenty-minute walk. Sticking our head out the bedroom window reveals a fine view of Vesuvius across the bay, as you see above. It's quiet, except for an occasional barking dog or a worker hammering at a stucco wall. I've found, on many Italian sojourns, that stucco walls seem to need a considerable amount of percussive adjustment. But here in Naples, so far at least, this work seems sporadic, even laconic, and I think they've already forgotten about the whole thing.

 We have a fine big sitting room serving also as our dining room; a fine big bedroom with its closet, and between them a fully equipped kitchen and a small but perfectly suitable bathroom: all this at the price of a cheap hotel downtown. The two large rooms are roughly cubical, ten feet or so on a side; and they are light and airy, though there are windows only on one wall, facing south.

 The apartment is carved out of one side of the second of perhaps five floors in the building, which is one of a number of early 20th-century palazzi on a private driveway, whose gate to the Corso Vittorio Emanuele is watched by a watchman, what else, in his little office. We're high above the street — uncharacteristically, I forgot to count the steps when I walked down to the street this morning. A couple of hundred, I imagine. Fortunately there are elevators: one through the six storeys of the building in front of us, another in our own building.

 A hundred steps or so from our cancello, the gate onto Corso Vittorio Emanuele, you come to one of the Naples funiculars which, for a euro, takes you up to the top of our hill — the oddly named Vomero (the word probably derives from the Italian word for "ploughshare") — or down to the bottom taking you to the Piazza Amadeo. That's about all I can tell you now; we spent most of the day settling it and sleeping. Well, eating, too, of course; and I've already posted the day's meals to the other blog. The pizza was really quite delicious, and we managed a nice little supper back home. But it's been a long day, and that's it for now…Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-21186940190902788962015-04-28T05:16:00.001-07:002015-04-28T05:16:50.395-07:00Library matters
Eastside Road, April 27, 2015—
I returned yesterday from a five-day trip to Oregon, there on a sad assignment: assessing the library of my friend Bhishma Xenotechnites, also known as Douglas Leedy, who died just over a month ago.

A composer, performer, scholar, writer, traveler, and in his last years recluse, Bhishma lived in a pleasant two-bedroom house in the college town Corvallis, to whose Oregon State University he intended his books to be given. I thought it important to have at least a catalog of his collection before it is distributed, and if possible some kind of inventory of its marginalia, because, as I say, Bhishma was among other things a scholar: his reading was extensive, intensive, and careful; and many of his books, I thought, would contain evidence of both the range of his interests and the development, perhaps, of the major themes preoccupying his fine creative mind. I was not prepared for the extent of the assignment: two weeks would hardly have sufficed.

In the meantime, another volunteer, younger, more diligent, and better trained than I, was going through the papers, separating and sorting correspondence, manuscripts, fair copies of completed work, and beginning what promises to be a considerable but clearly organized catalogue of the literary bequest. For that catalogue I prepared the following

Note on Leedy's Library

Leedy was a dedicated but careful reader with a relatively small library, whose books were generally shelved in rooms in which they were used. The largest number were displayed in the large sitting-room bookcase, five vertical arrays of eight shelves each, two by eight feet: Here were many books of Greek and Latin writers — more of the former — in the Loeb editions as well as others; here too were many books and sections of books he had photocopied, folded and stapled for his own purposes.

Here too is a small but imposing collection of facsimile editions; some of music; others of texts. Reference books include two editions of Grove's Dictionary, the compact edition of the OED, and a number of foreign-language dictionaries.

There are perhaps four feet of musical scores in this room, which had also housed his harpsichord; and a few biographies of composers, Will and Ariel Durant's eleven-volume world history, and some miscellaneous literary works, including six volumes of the Library of America (Thoreau, three volumes of Melville, one each of Mark Twain and Gertrude Stein).

The kitchen contained four two-foot shelves of cookbooks, many of them devoted to Indian cuisine, many others to baking; and another shelf divided between books on gardening and on home maintenance.

In the study were a number of scores, in particular many of choral music, as well as ten or twelve feet of books on various subjects — architecture, mathematics, history, medicine, philosophy, popular philosophy. In the bedroom, perhaps thirty books, apparently mostly recently acquired, on a variety of subjects, many having to do with classical antiquity; and three shelves of videotapes and DVDs, again on a variety of themes, again many related to the Hellenic world.

Many of these books are annotated. There are three usual kinds of annotation, nearly always in very faint pencil, in a very small hand, resisting reproduction. Often there is a kind of index of page numbers on issues of interest, pencilled onto a flyleaf. At other times marginalia are written directly into the book's pages; and often these express either disagreement with or an amplification of a statement the author has made.

At other times, though, slips are inserted between the pages, with more extended comments, or memos to himself. In rare cases such slips bear notes having nothing to do with the book: perhaps his reading was interrupted, he made a quick note and used it as a bookmark. In a number of cases pages are apparently saved with such slips, or with blank bookmarks, or by tucking the flap of the dust-jacket between pages. One can't always be sure the reading was interrupted at those points. A blank slip or bookmark seems often to have been placed in a newly acquired book, presumably against the time it would be wanted. Pages of particular significance to the reader were generally noted in pencil on a flyleaf.

Until some time in the last few years it had been Leedy's habit to inscribe hi name on the cover, inside the front cover, or on a flyleaf. Over the years the form changed from "douglas leedy" to "d.leedy", sometimes with a date but usually not. (Capital letters never appeared in these inscriptions.) Books acquired on travels frequently bear the place of purchase: Bergen; Warsaw; Madras.

Leedy read in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Polish, Latin, and (ancient) Greek, but except for facsimile editions and books by Latin and (especially) Greek-writing authors, very nearly all the books are in English. In recent years many seem to have been bought as remainders. It is surprising that the majority of the books appear not to have been read: bindings are tight; dust jackets when present unchipped and bright -- yet in many cases faint pencil annotations appear throughout.

Let me suggest the nature of his interests by noting the contents of the coffee table by his sofa, where I believe he did a fair amount of his reading when not at the worktable in his office. The coffee table was left apparently as it was on March 13 when he left his home for he last time:

Two blank notepads.

Manual for a Scenario scientific calculator.

Georger Brookshaw: Pomona Britannica, the complete plates. Taschen.

Aeeschylus: The Oresteia. tr. Robert Fagles. At p 144, slip with note: "Scarcely reflects [[[illeg] in 30 yrs / DIVIDINES ?SPRING"

Simon Blackburn: Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. 2005. bookmark at p. 40.

ed. Tamara Levitz: Stravinsky and his world. Princeton. bookmark at p. 142.

Howard Zinn: A People's History of the United States 1492-Present. Revised and updated ed. 1995. At p. 200, note on slip: "symphonycast.org / Org. / b'cast 21 Apr / Carnegie Dec 1/2 concert / Chavez/Orbón/Revueltas / [horiz. line] [upside-down:] 789 June"

R.K. Narayan: Under the Banyan Tree & Other Stories. Viking. Flap tucked in at p. 82.

Namita Devidayal: The Music Room: a memoir. St. Martin's Press. Flap tucked in at ch. 2.

Arthur A. Macdonell: A Vedic Reader for Students. Madras: Oxford U.P., 1972. note on flyleaf: "meter xvii". bookmark 98/9. swn p. 164: "Vedic Meters in Macdonell" [hor. line] [list of 6 entries with page numbers]"; also, on nine of ten staves on scrap of paper, "TWO VERSIONS OF USHA (Macdonell USAS, p. 93-9) / started ca. 1987-8 8/2009

Cassell's New Latin Dictionary. Funk & Wagnalls, 1959.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Letters in Gold: Ottoman calligraphy from the Sakip Sabanci collection, Istanbul. 1998.

La Libia Antigua: Ciudades perdidas del Imperio Romano. Photographs by Robert Polidori; text by Antonino DeVita, Ginette DeVita-Evrard, Lidiano Bacchielli. Paris: Editions Mengès, 1998.

A green pencil; a red crayon-pencil; a glue stick; a fingernail scissors; a tuning fork; a plastic soprano recorder; a tin whistle; a thumb-piano; a round lens on a handle; a small black plastic Grundig radio (YB-305) with case; a transparent plastic 12-inch ruler (also metric); a Scenario calculator (Model SC-110); the remote control for the Heat-N-Glo automatic gas fireplace; a rubber band; three braided-straw coasters.

And, on the floor at the coffee table:

Michael Grant: Atlas of Classical History. NY: OXford UP, 1994. No marginalia, but Index of proper names considerably annotated, corrected, and expanded. At p. 22/3, slip: "HUDOR / OL 685-91 / [in list form:] Cities Thebes Athens Corinth Mytilene Sardis Susa Acroyas Syracuse Taras Cyrenee Jerusalem Miletus Crete

Atlas of Oregon. Univ Oregon Pr, 1976

Finally, for the moment, I note the few items on a very short shelf intended for horizontal books, apparently used as a through-the-door depository, and containing items he had with him at the end:

Sibelius: Symphony no. 6. W Hansen. Score. Inscribed on cover, "dleedy"

Gildersleeve and Lodge: Latin Grammar. Macmillan. At p. 52/3, on "Peace" postcard, note: "QVID AVTEM ALIVD IN NOSTRIS LEGIONIBVS CORNVA AC TVBÆ FACIVNT? QVORUVM CONCENTVS QVANTO EST VEHEMENTIOR, TANTVM ROMANA IN BELLIS GLORIA CETERIS PRÆSTAT. / Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 1.10.14 / And what else is the function of the horns and trumpets in our legions? The more assertive their sound, the more does Roman military glory dominate the world. / tr. D.A. Fussell, Loeb edition".

Атлас Мира [World Atlas]. Inscribed inside front cover: "dhleedy / Warszawa V/66 / Miedzynasodowy Targ / Ksiaiek"

Pindar: Nemean Odes; Isthmian Odes; Fragments (Loeb). Notes on flyleaf: ★ NB / ext. music ref N.9.1-10 / youths' voices N.3.65-6 / immortality in song N.6.28-38 / also 53-4 / N.7 12-3 / N.9 48-0 + / bad singing N.7.71 / (!) χρὔςόν Ν.7.78 / wer fr 110 p342 ★.

Stravinsky: Apollon Musagète. Revised 1947 edition. Score: Boosey & Hawkes. Inscribed on cover: "doug leedy 1960".

Coqt, Jean: Skagen.

Coqt, Jean: Tarifa.

Mary Renault: The Praise Singer.

Douglas Leedy: A Venerable temperament rediscovered. Perspectives of New Music, 29/2 (reprint)

Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-83721885011682411472015-04-17T22:19:00.001-07:002015-04-17T22:35:19.610-07:00Theater that touches the heart

Marcel Pagnol: Fanny
Translated, from the French,
and directed by Roland David Valayre
Generation Theatre, San Francisco
seen 16 April 2015

Berkeley, 17 April, 2015—

WE SEE SO MUCH professional theater — probably ten or twelve productions a year — that we too easily fall into the trap of dismissing local and community theater as substandard, when of course that's not at all the point. What is the point, I think, is the earnest and effective celebration of the literature of theater in a manner that approaches what seems to me to be its fundamental purpose, which is to investigate the human condition as the human animal makes its uneasy triangulation of self, society, and Nature.

Few playwrights manage that better than the Provençal Marcel Pagnol. As Roland Valayre notes in the program to this production, one of he "many talents as a playwright is his ability to create characters that can be both funny and moving within the same action, sometimes within the same sentence." Among his many successes in that direction is the Marseilles trilogy Marius, Fanny, and César, reasonably well known to American aficionados through the memorable film productions Pagnol made soon after the advent of talking motion pictures, but all too rarely given as legitimate theater in English.

Pagnol seems to me to be particularly appropriate to semiprofessional or amateur performers, whose own amiable weaknesses when compared (as they should not be) to seasoned professionals seem to underscore the frailties of Pagnol's characters — who represent, of course, you and me; certainly me.

Two years ago this Generations Theater presented the first play of the trilogy, and now, for a short time, they're back with the second, and it is welcome and worth seeing. There are problems, God knows, but those concerned with production were probably opening-night glitches — sound cues far too loud, scene-ending fades too slow, uncertain curtains.

Overcoming those drawbacks was the undoubted good will and earnest affection for the text. Fannny opens with the concluding scene from the first play, Marius, recapitulating Marius's stormy departure from his father's bar and Fanny, the love of his life, for the more urgent call from maritime adventure, and then quickly we're presented with the engaging quartet César (bar-owner, Marius's father), Panisse (prosperous sailmaker), Escartefigue (ferryboat skipper), and that gentleman from Lyon M. Brun. All in their fifties or thereabout, they function as a sort of Greek chorus — Pagnol knew his classics well — representing the common man confronted with social and technological change in the period just after World War I.

I think the direction of the opening quartet, revealing the time passed since Marius's departure and Cesar's impatience at the lack of news from him, and expressing perhaps a characteristically Provençal cunning and irony, was too slow, threatening to sap the energy needed to grab the audience and move the play — a vehicle spending too much time in lower gears. I hope this changes in later performances.

The characterization seemed nicely done, though. A number of these actors are in fact French, though perfectly at ease in English; they have an advantage in being familiar with the Pagnol stock characters, and recreate them readily.

With the appearance of the female actors Pagnol's play moves from badinage and bonhomie to domestic tragedy. Marius has left Fanny pregnant; her mother Honorine is furious; her simpleminded aunt Claudine sympathetic. The play continues through its predictable course; it is its humanity and sympathy in dealing with the complex layers of morality and responsibility that maintain the audience's interest, not simply turns of plot.

Fanny is funny and warm-hearted and utterly humane, but it is also a serious play. The trick to success with Pagnol is the balance of these elements: and gradually, through the duration of the performance last night, opening night, that balance was struck. The goofy and — let's face it — rather labored practical joking of the opening scene moved, through the second act, and particularly the third, toward dramatic exposition of poignant, complex, quite engaging explorations of basic human quandary. Frailty of cast and direction met frailty of human character and motivation; in a sense, human issues, and Pagnol's art in investigating them, and the company's adequacies in bringing them to the audience, all began to converge.

Fanny is clearly the middle play of a trilogy. This production deals quite well with the problem of the missing "prequel," if you don't know it; but it definitely left me wanting to see the resolution. M. Panisse, assured me, as we were leaving, that the final play, César, would appear next year. In the meantime, and to prepare for its delights, I recommend you drop in on Fanny. The production runs through April 26.
Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-28950996869889291692015-04-13T13:18:00.001-07:002015-04-13T21:43:11.266-07:00Figaro qua, Figaro là…

•Charles Morey: Figaro.
 adapted from Le mariage de Figaro,
 by Pierre de Beaumarchais.
 Directed by Michael Michetti.
 Seen at A Noise Within, Pasadena, California,
 10 April 2015

•Mozart and da Ponte: Le nozze di Figaro.
 Conducted by James Conlon; directed by Ian Judge.
 Seen at Los Angeles Opera, 9 April 2015

Eastside Road, April 13, 2015—
<big>L</big>AST WEEK ENDED in a flurry of theater: two versions of the great Marriage of Figaro; a production of Julius Caesar; a production of The Threepenny Opera. Let's begin with Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, 1732-1799, whose article in Wikipedia introduces him as "a French playwright, watchmaker, inventor, musician, diplomat, fugitive, spy, publisher, horticulturalist, arms dealer, satirist, financier, and revolutionary (both French and American)." I take the following three paragraphs from the Wikipedia entry:

Born simply Pierre-Augustin Caron, the son of a watchmaker from the provinces who had apparently settled in Paris, he took early to music, but was apprenticed as a matter of course to his father. At twenty-one he invented a refinement of the escapement mechanism which greatly improved the reliability and lessened the size of watches, which brought him to the notice of the king. Two years later he married a widow with money and land, and took the name "Beaumarchais," but she died with a year, and he fell into debt.

His fortunes turned quickly, though, and he became music=teacher to the four daughters of Louis XV. (He taught them harp.) He met an older entrepreneur, Joseph Paris Duverney, who helped him in a number of business ventures, by which he became rich and gained further access to French nobility.

In 1764 Beaumarchais spent ten months in Madrid, helping a sister who had married there. His bid for consulship to Spain was rejected, and he turned increasingly to business ventures while beginning to experiment with writing plays; his first drama, Eugénie, premiered at the Comédie Française in 1767.

Beaumarchais is best known nowadays, and especially outside of France, through the first two plays of his trilogy centered on recurring characters at court of Count Almaviva, grand corrégidor of Andalusia: Le Barbier de Séville, premiered in 1775; Le Mariage de Figaro (1784), and La Mère coupable (1792).

Anyone who knows The Barber of Seville (Rossini and Sterbini) and The Marriage of Figaro (Mozart and da Ponte), the great operatic settings of the first two plays, will recognize autobiographical elements in the plots. Music teacher to nobility; factotum from the lower orders; lawsuits (Beaumarchais was engaged in several); marriages (ditto)… it has even been suggested that Figaro's name is a thin disguise of the playwright's, who was fils Caron, son of Caron.

Figaro is of course a memorable character, thanks primarily to Lorenzo da Ponte's adaptation of the second play. Da Ponte himself was a Beaumarchais-like character; the decade 1776-1786 was a heady time; the intersection of literature, populism, entrepreneurship, greatly increased travel and the sophistication that naturally follows, and of course the age of revolution all participate in the brilliance and edginess of Figaro's character. (And yet my first memory of Figaro is of the black cat hungrily gazing at the goldfish Cleo in the 1940 Disney adaptation of Pinocchio.)

<big>A</big>LL THAT SAID, what was to be learned from last week's exposure to The Marriage of Figaro in both its original theatrical form and da Ponte and Mozart's operatic setting? First, of course, the power of music (and particularly of Mozart's); second, the brilliance of da Ponte's libretto; but a close third, the surprising depth and richness of the play. A quick disclaimer: I don't know the original; I've never seen the play before in any language, and I haven't read the original. (Yet: the entire text is readily available at Wikisource.)

As adapted by Charles Morey and directed, wonderfully, by Michael Michetti, Figaro is completely within the tradition ranging from Commedia dell'arte through 19th-century French farce to the Marx Brothers and even, as the actors pointed out in a post-performance talkback with the audience, to such standard television fare as Seinfeld. I suspect Morey studied da Ponte carefully and did a similar job of streamlining. A couple of minor characters have been dropped (Grippe-soleil, a young shepherd; Pédrille, a message-boy to the count; and with them, probably a sub-plot or two, not to be missed in this already complicated comedy.

Now that I look at the pivotal resolution, which Mozart and da Ponte render so magnificent — the Count's plea for perdono, Contessa — I wonder at the changes Beaumarchais may have made in the original text to get it past Louis XV, who at first banned its public performance. The plot hinges on unmasking the Count's sexual immorality and exploitation; he finally has to beg forgiveness of the Countess, who of course grants it. Clearly a sitting king will not countenance such a plot, and in the text as we have it the moment is underplayed. Two years after the Paris premiere, da Ponte and Mozart elevate that moment to something exalted, transcendent. Even so, the play is clearly political, subversive, revolutionary.

Michetti's direction and the Noise Within cast conveyed all the urgency, the sharp political satire, and the philosophical complexity of the play in a fast, sometimes zany, often touching performance. In the title role, Jeremy Guskin was perfectly brilliant, easily switching from broad comedy to darker, intelligent brooding — the great monologue in Act Five, only a little revised in Morey's adaptation, was marvelous. Angela Sauer's Suzanne was up to that challenge; and if Count Almaviva is costumed ludicrously and made foolish and foppish, Andrew Ross Wynn made the concept work. Elyse Mirto was an affecting Countess, and Will Bradley was utterly persuasive as Cherubin in spite of his tall, lean stature. The rest of the cast were remarkably even, flexible, and resourceful: every nuance of the play seemed perfectly interpreted; there was never a slow moment; even the complex second-act ensemble, with characters hiding in closets and jumping out of windows, worked like, well, clockwork. The production continues in repertory through May 10, 2015, and it should certainly not be missed.

Alas, the same could not be said of Los Angeles Opera's production, or its young cast's performance, of the opera. Seen from too far away, in too big an opera house, in a musical performance that was too weighty and strove too earnestly for greatness, this Nozze di Figaro was laborious. There were some pretty voices and some successful portrayals, but I left with the feeling I'd seen an awkward attempt by a provincial company.

•William Shakespeare: Julius Caesar.
 Directed by Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and Geoff Elliott

•Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera.
 Directed by Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and Geoff Elliott
 Both seen at A Noise Within, Pasadena, California,
 11 April 2015

<Big>F</big>OR YEARS NOW we have subscribed to the plays performed by A Noise Within, the repertory theater company based formerly in Glendale and now in its own building in Pasadena. Founded by actors who had been with ACT in San Francisco, the company mounts seven productions each year: three plays in the fall, three in the spring, and a Christmas special.

The repertory has always included Shakespeare, usually two plays each season, set next to American classics by such playwrights as William Inge and Tennessee Williams, frequent trips into the French repertory, and occasional looks at the classic avant-garde (Ionesco; Beckett). The schedule works out in such a way that we can nearly always see all three plays of each half-season within three or four days, making it a convenient run-out from home. Every year we make this trip twice, just as every year we travel once or twice to Ashland for performances by the much wealthier Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I won't engage in comparisons here.

This year's Noise Within season had as its theme "Revolution": last November we saw three plays revolutionary in their time for style: Shakespeare'sThe Tempest , Oscar Wilde'sThe Importance of Being Earnest , and August Strindberg's The Dance of Death. Last week's plays were not only revolutionary in the style of their concept and expression, they were in fact about revolution. In addition to Figaro they were Julius Caesar and The Threepenny Opera , both shows directed by the same team and performed in the same stage design — and seen, as it turned out, on the same day.

This is the kind of intellectual and theatrical exercise A Noise Within often attempts, nearly as often successfully. The pairing of these two very different vehicles underscored profundities which are latent in the scripts and which should be obvious to any reader or onlooker, whatever the success of the production; in this event, the result was really quite powerful, really moving. I thought Threepenny suffered a bit from slow tempi, which tended to hamper the drive and bite of the play; but that flaw could be forgiven in the face of the detail, the passion, and the total authenticity of the performances.

Both plays were staged in a relatively unspecified early-twentieth-century setting, the stage occupied by stark industrial scaffolding. Both brought the audience into the piece: in Julius Caesar one felt included within the Roman rabble irresolute between Caesar's attackers and his defenders; in Threepenny one was directly confronted by the cast, intent on alienating its audience with fine Brechtian nastiness.

I thought it appropriate that we were seeing these productions in the week of Judith Malina's death — The Living Theatre, which she and Julian Beck co-founded in the 1950s to such and artistic triumph and controversy, has surely influenced these directors in these productions; and Malina would have appreciated the result, I think, though perhaps with a sardonic observation that it was high time the commercial theater fall into line.

That Living Theatre connection came to me at the beginning of The Threepenny Opera, which began indistinctly, with the cast roaming through the audience, moodily repeating isolated lines of dialogue from various moments in the play. We were eased into the play, you might say, albeit in quite an uneasy manner; there was a deliciously menacing quality to the moment, and though this was the evening performance that moment instantly threw the afternoon's Julius Caesar into yet another layer of ironic meaning.

A Noise Within has a fine website from which you'll get notes on the productions and cast lists; I won't attempt a detailed review here. I do have to mention, though, the strong Brutus of Robertson Dean; the eloquent Mark Antony of Rafael Goldstein; the engaging, complex clarity of Freddy Douglas's Cassius; which requires that I also mention Patrick O'Connell's successfully ambivalent, tragically aging Caesar. Other roles were as well conceived and performed.

In Threepenny we were impressed, my companion and I, by the quality of the singing. As Polly Peachum and Lucy Brown, Marisa Duchowny and Maegan McConnell had clear, accurate, expressive, well-focussed soprano voices; Andrew Ableson was a pleasantly reedy, sardonic, nasty Mâcheath; Stasha Surdyke captured Jenny Diver's complexity well. Geoff Elliott makes an all too credible Peachum, and Deborah Strang was quite marvelous as his Mrs., drawing the first row of the audience into the Ballad of Sexual Dependency with sarcasm and good humor that somehow coexist.

Speaking of that Ballad, though, reminds me that it was hard to get used to this translation, by Michael Feingold. It works, but seems a little stiff. I was steeped in Eric Bentley's translation, back in the middle 1950s; it seemed to me to have bite and efficiency lacking here — Bentley's "First feed the belly, then feed the mind" (as I recall it) works better than Feingold's "First comes the feeding, then the moral code." I don't know the original text; perhaps Bentley sacrificed literal accuracy to theatrical effect — but isn't that what Brecht and Weill were after?

Julius Caesar continues in repertory through May 8, 2015; The Threepenny Opera through May 9.
Details online at A Noise Within.

Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-11404404063984126542015-04-08T06:45:00.001-07:002015-04-11T00:11:33.130-07:00Sinfonia muta

•Charles Shere: Sinfonia muta,
for voice, violin, and percussion; duration ca. 1:30.
Healdsburg: Ear Press, 2015
Full study score, 5.5x8.5, 2 pages

Eastside Road, April 7, 2015—
<big>W</big>E WERE IN MILAN in late November, 2008, having dinner in a trattoria a day or two before flying home — I've looked at my notes, but I can't identify the restaurant.

Doesn't matter: the only thing memorable at the place was the waiter, an engaging fellow, in his fifties I'd say, who eyed me closely, then asked what I did. Pittore? Scrittore? Yes, scrivo un po' , I write a little, I said, and I compose a little music.

I thought it was something of the sort, he said. I'm a poet: and he handed me a little poem printed on a slip of paper. Here's something to make a song, he said:
Sinfonia Muta

il silenzio sta come un orco enorme
pronto ad ingoiarmi
non gli doretta e lo strangolo
col mio canto d'amore per te

I set it aside but glanced at it from time to time during dinner, and with my postprandial grappa sketched out a setting for voice, violin, and percussion on the menu, leaving it behind as a little gift for the waiter.

Here's the translation, as far as I can supply it — there's a word in the fourth line makes no sense to me. "Doretta" may have been my misreading, or it may be dialect…
Mute Symphony

Silence stands, an enormous whale
ready to swallow me up
don't… and I'll strangle it
with the lovesong I've made for you
On returning home I quickly transcribed my sketch at the computer, but the photo has since been mislaid, so I can no longer verify the text…

If you can supply a better translation, leave it as a comment, and I'll send you a print copy of the score.

(A few days later:) As I hoped, my luddite friend Stimato Fabbrò, who does not like to leave comments, sent me another kind of message, clearing up the mystery. In the fourth line two words had been run together: it should read non gli do retta e lo strangolo, meaning "I pay [him] no heed and I'll strangle him…". So the poem translates, roughly,
There's Silence, an enormous whale
ready to swallow me up
he doesn't scare me
i'll strangle him with the lovesong I've made
for you

Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-86768077064380897832015-04-05T02:44:00.001-07:002015-04-05T02:44:51.827-07:00Art as social commentary
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Provincetown  (1995)

•Legends of the Bay Area:
Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Marin Museum of Contemporary Art
500 Palm Drive, Novato, California
tel. 415-506—0137
W-F 11-4; Sa-Su 11-5; closes April 5

•Mildred Howard: Spirit and Matter.
Richmond Art Center
2540 Barrett Avenue, Richmond, California
tel. 510-620-6772
Tu-Sa 10-5; Su 12-5; closes May 24

Eastside Road, April 4, 2015—
<big>L</big>AWRENCE FERLINGHETTI is locally famous — as poet, personality, and bookseller. His City Lights Books has been a nexus of literacy since the days of the Beat Poets: he counted Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso and Michael McClure among his friends.

I knew that he painted, but always assumed that his painting amounted to something of a hobby. Hobby: terrible word. The French have a better expression, violon d'Ingres , referring to the music Ingres turned to when he wasn't concentrating on his primary art, painting and drawing. It's not uncommon for artists to work at two quite dissimilar genres, often one of them time-based — music, theater, poetry — and the other primarily visual: painting, sculpture.

The exhibition of Ferlinghetti's visual work, primarily painting but including also a few prints, suggests that he often confronts his work quite seriously, though he's quoted as saying "Painting is more like play than work." He began painting in Paris in the late 1940s, when he was studying literature at the Sorbonne, and has maintained a studio ever since coming to San Francisco sixty-odd years ago. (He is still painting, at 96.) The earliest work in this exhibition, Deux , recalls Cocteau; though a canvas, it's essentially a line drawing of two profiled male faces confronting one another, one upside-down, like the figures at the corner of a playing card.

Though he admired the abstract expressionism of the Beats, he found himself unable to resist representation, especially of the figure. (He dislikes the term "abstract expressionism," finding it a contradiction in terms.) His best paintings bear the scrubbed light of Ab Ex painters: Elmer Bischoff and Hassel Smith come to mind. The calligraphy of the framing inside the hull of the boat in Provincetown makes me think of Franz Kline, whose influence shows up elsewhere. But, staying with Provincetown , the two figures inside the hull again recall school-of-Paris painters; it's not a stretch to relate them back to the profiled faces in Deux.

The boat is a recurring motif in Ferlinghetti's painting; perhaps a memory of his own transatlantic crossing.

Sun Boat 2 (2009)

In Sun Boat 2 the boat is little more than counterweight to the brilliant energy of the upper half of the canvas; in an untitled print (made at Crown Point Press in San Francisco) it forms part of a narrative, in a small piece whose elegance and wit is hard to resist. (The male figure reaching up out of the water will remind some of us of both Picasso and Picabia, but the piece is fully Ferlinghetti's.)

A number of the works here make comments of a social or political nature, and they seem to me the weakest work — rushed, blatant, obvious; more slogan than painting — though the 1999 Mother Russia , whose expressive face is defined with an artfully drawn hammer-and-sickle, and whose posture and tone recall the Russian qualities of Chagall and (Arshile) Gorky, is exceptional in this respect, quiet yet rather deep, "poetic" in its juxtaposition of signs (woman, bird), telling it the downward motion of the street.

At 96, Ferlinghetti is free from anxieties concerning position; his painting, like his poetry, stands on its own, a good member of a rich and vibrant society of artists, poets, writers, activists. This is a retrospective in more ways than one: the viewer can't help recalling the work of previous decades, can't help noting the inevitable vitiation of their movements, platforms, and insights. Yet the human spirit persists, and expression is the inevitable result. To Ferlinghetti's credit there's a fair amount of joy and beauty as well as occasional impatience with the social human condition.

The Painter (1989)

Installation, Mildred Howard: Spirit and Matter , Richmond Art Center

<big>M</big>ILDRED HOWARD is an artist of considerable standing in an area — Northern California — not exactly hurting for powerful, mature artists. She has worked in collage, painting, assemblage, and sculpture for decades, always bringing to her work intellectual energy drawn from a sober, serious contemplation of self and society. I don't know any artist who excels her in treating the significance of being African-American in contemporary American society, or in treating the history of that situation, without bogging down in mere politics-of-the-moment. A "white," I can't of course speak from within that "situation": but it does seem to me the significance, the meaning, the roots and the reach of Howard's work must be the same to a black viewer as to a white.

It's curious: her work is intensely personal, sometimes using her own face and hand as the visual center of the work; yet the result transcends self. That wonderful critic R.H. Blyth writes, in his Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics , of four types of expression: from top to bottom, as you might say, "the object treated objectively", "the object treated subjectively," "the subject treated objectively," "the subject treated subjectively." (His examples range from "almost all of Chaucer; Shakespeare's songs…" at the top to the "Chamber of Horrors" at the bottom: "The larger part of Byron, a great deal of Shelley and Keats… the pièce de résistance is Yeats' Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths/… Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.)

In this formula Mildred Howard often works, I think, with the subject the "black" presence in the American scheme) treated objectively. I have generally preferred objective objects, and this is why I like Puryear and Guston; but if you're going to make a career as an artist contemplating the significance latent in the intersection of self and society, you can't do that any more objectively than Howard does. She never complains or shouts or cajoles. She contemplates, as I say, and presents the material of her contemplation, and expresses its complexity and reality — its objectivity — as a matter of social fact.

She also contemplates Art. One of the best pieces here, I think, and one of the best pieces of its type I've seen anywhere, is a tall four-legged unpainted wooden stool out of whose seat has risen a long-handled cast iron skillet. Skillet to the Frying Pan: Sitting Black , it's called — Howard's titles, often small poems themselves, are never to be neglected; they lead the viewer's mind into unspecified richnesses associated with the visual "meaning" of the pieces they name.

The visual reference includes Duchamp, of course; if like me you live with a copy of his famous Bicycle Wheel you'll greet Sitting Black with familiar pleasure. But at the center of the bottom of this skillet, angled up toward you as you lean in to look at it, is an old-time photographic portrait of an African-American woman, unnamed, unknown most likely unless a member of the artist's own family. Suddenly the gap, the gulf between everything Duchamp was concerned with and the history of the African-American presence in American society hits you like, well, a black iron frying pan.

Resonance; resonance. Yet the sculpture — and sculpture it is, there's no denying that — is beautiful, elegant, and aloof in its elegant beauty. If its size and proportions suggest a standing figure, it's a figure Joan Mirò might have conjured, with Giacometti somewhere in his mind. Howard treats this object of her own devising subjectively, to judge by the title, but she's reaching toward objectivity, and her work — her skill, patience, sophistication, and above all intelligence — permits us to follow her in completely resolving the subjective component to achieve a fully objective state of mind, contemplating the object without an agenda, without straining at a specific (let alone a socially charged) meaning.

Howard has been well known for a series of pieces referring to House; two are present here. In the installation photo you can see one playing domesticity and edge: the empty geometry of the house is made of channels of aluminum, I believe, completely covered on every surface with table knives. The floor is littered with an amazing collection of silver — candlesticks, compotes, candy-dishes, trays, pitchers — ultimately forming a path leaving the house toward the gallery wall, covered with white wallboard into which dozens of knives — sharp knives, not tableware — have apparently been stabbed, perhaps thrown, in gestures which can be interpreted as either violently aggressive or merely — merely ! — futile and frustrated. It's a big, complex, finally irresolute piece, I think: objectively subjective, perhaps.

In an adjacent hallway there's a small example of Howard's bottle houses, cabins made almost exclusively of bottles. This one is small, made of dozens of identical brown glass bottles each holding only an ounce or two of… I don't know what, originally: the label mentions beer, but these look more like vanilla-extract bottles. Whatever they are, they are of course as beautiful as glass: perfectly uniform in color and texture and size, with the inert regularity of manufactured components — brick, tile. Lean into the open end of this bottle house and admire the light it admits.

This is a big show, a very important one; a mid-career retrospective presenting an artist who has quietly staked out for herself an uncommonly intelligent, probing, thoughtful position on art, self, and society, and expressed that position with unusually prolific, clear, consistently elegant, and often joyous work. I looked at this show thinking of great Richmond Art Center shows of the past, of Tom Marioni's direction in the 1960s, for example. Everyone involved with the show, its installation, and its curation is to be congratulated.
<big>N</big>O VISIT TO THE Richmond Art Center should overlook the marvelous folk sculpture tucked away, almost unnoticeably, in the shrubbery of the courtyard. They make a particularly poignant counterpoise to Mildred Howard's retrospective. I'm embarrassed and ashamed that I don't know who made them, and it's late Saturday night, I can't call to find out before putting up this blog Sunday morning — I'll try to rectify this in a later correction.

There's one other piece of sculpture in that courtyard, and I'm really unhappy about its treatment. It's a beautiful, formal, abstractly geometrical work in marble by the Italian-American San Francisco sculptor Elio Benvenuto. I knew him, casually, back in the 1950s I think: a tall, slender, elegant, courtly man with a fine eye and hand, a true heir to the Italian sculptural tradition.

This piece should be indoors, on a stand lifting it well off the floor, where the viewer can take his time with it, on its terms, letting light play across its polished surfaces, bounce off its edges and details. Instead it's on the ground on raw dirt, in shadow, at the edge of a concrete pavement, for all the world as if has been rejected, abandoned with no thought at all to its beauty, let alone the skill and dedication of the artist who made it.

Come to think of it, Benvenuto's position, seventy years ago, as an Italian immigrant bringing the artistic values of his society to the San Francisco Bay Area, is somewhat analogous to Mildred Howard's. And to that of the temporarily anonymous maker of the charming yet poignant cement sculptures nearby. An exhibition presenting work by the three artists together would be a fascinating depiction and examination of the urges and preoccupations they hold in common.

Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-74471706926975348072015-03-31T07:51:00.001-07:002015-06-21T10:23:58.311-07:00Bhishma Xenotechnites1938-2015

Bhishma Xenotechnites, August 2010
(photo: Ann Basart, released into the public domain, cc-zero)

Eastside Road, March 29, 2015—
<big>O</big>VER THE YEARS there have been occasional references on this blog to my reclusive friend to the north. He was so reclusive that I hesitated to mention him by name; he was a man who very much desired his privacy. Yesterday, though, he left us for that ultimate privacy, and today I begin a reminiscence — an informal one, which will likely accumulate in future occasional postings.

In the middle 1980sis I wrote a short biographical note on him for The New Grove Dictionary ; I won't reproduce it here for copyright reasons, but here's a trot:

Douglas Leedy: Born Portland, Oregon, March 3, 1938
Studied Pomona College, UC Berkeley (MA 1962)
Played French horn, Oakland Symphony, San Francisco Opera and Ballet orchestras, 1960-65
Traveled in Poland, 1965-66
Designed electronic music studio, taught, and led ensembles, UCLA, 1967-70
1970-80 taught at Reed College, USC, and Centro Simon Bolivar in Caracas
1970s began drawing away from equal temperament, western European romanticism, and Modernism
1979-80 studied with K.V. Narayanaswamy in Madras
1984-85 mus. dir. Portland Baroque Orchestra, Portland Handel Festival

His relocation to his native Oregon — at first in Portland; subsequently Oceanside, Netarts, and finally Corvallis — coincided with a definitive break with Modernism, equal-temperament, and Euro-American politics and economics as they had developed in the years since the early 1960s. For a time he taught at Reed College, in Portland; and he undertook a conducting career, with considerable musical success in the 1985 Handel Festival in Portland. His increasing inability to compromise his ethical and musical standards made performance distasteful, however, and he withdrew from public performance and teaching. It was about then that he put away his birth name, Douglas Leedy, and revealed a new his newly re-integrated persona, Bhishma Xenotechnites. As he described himself, he was "a strictly West Coast, empirical, non-academic musician."

left to right: Terry Riley, CS, Ann Riley, Bhishma Xenotechnites at Hetch Hetchy, California, Sept. 2002  (photo: Lindsey Shere)

At about the turn of the century he began showing symptoms of a muscle-wasting disease, later diagnosed as Inclusion Body Myositis. By September 2002, when he made his last hike with Terry Riley and me and our wives, he was already walking with difficulty, requiring a cane and unable to negotiate stairs. Increasing frailty did not interfere with his scholarship, but by 2011 or so he was having increasing difficulty playing at the keyboard.

In the first decade of this century he was increasingly drawn to the monuments of archaic and ancient Greek. He argued that the great poets, playwrights and even in early cases the philosophers were in fact composers, in that their work was intended for public sung performance; and he dedicated his final years to a proposed restoration of the sound of this important body of work. Already used to the acquisition of languages — he spoke passable Spanish, French, Polish, German, and Latin — he became a fluent reader of Latin and ancient Greek.

Ultimately the result was a magnum opus of his own, Singing Ancient Greek, which was accepted for peer-review online publication by the University of California Classics department — unprecedentedly, in spite of his having no degrees in Classics. (The book can be read and downloaded here.)

I was fortunate — blessed, even — to have been close to Bhishma over the last dozen years, as the photo above suggests. We made a few trips together: on back roads through California's Coast Range to Parkfield; to the coast and up past Mission San Antonio; through the countryside around Mt. Shasta. Lindsey and I visited him nearly every time we drove through Oregon, two or three times a year. It was alarming to see his increasing frailty, but almost weekly telephone conversations, often of an hour's duration or more (and my friends and family know how I detest telephone conversations), continued to be diverting, instructive, and thought-provoking even in his last days. We talked about the weather, global matters, articles in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, the poetry of Virgil and Horace, music of course, old times, and last things. He never neglected to ask after my family and those of my friends he had met and had liked.

By the close of 2014 he had grown very frail. He could no longer swallow solid food — and he had always been a gourmet and a gifted cook. He could no longer hold books of more than the smallest dimension, let alone get them down from the shelf. He was falling frequently. Living alone was no longer really possible. I knew that he felt that with Singing Ancient Greek, complete in early 2014, and Monochord Matters, finished late last year, he felt that his work was done. He had no fear of death, and no taste for continued life on the terms he could not change.

On Friday March 13, ten days after his 77th birthday, he entered hospice in an assisted-living facility in Corvallis, taking with him recordings of Stravinsky's Apollon Musagète and Sibelius's Sixth Symphony and one book, "the greatest poet of them all" as he said, Pindar. There he died, on the evening of Saturday, March 28, as he had lived the past thirty years, on his own terms.

Bhishma was, I think, one of the most intelligent men I have ever known, and undoubtedly the most ethical, the least compromising, among the most wholly admirable. Important (and enjoyable!) as his musical compositions are; diverting as his occasional writings are (and I suppose some will be gathered for publication in coming months), timeless as Singing Ancient Greek is, for many of us who knew him it is the force and power and nobility and majesty, even, of his personality that will stay with us.

When he moved out of his house into hospice I sent a message to my grandson Simon Zivny, informing him. Simon — bright, young, enthusiastic, and gifted — instantaneously saw the news in musical terms, and sent me back his immediate transcription (listen here):

I immediately heard the piece in orchestral colors, and with Simon's permission I close with the score.

Listen here

Charles Sherehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-34835850345369915392015-03-28T18:15:00.001-07:002015-03-28T18:17:01.837-07:00More Shakespeare in Ashland

•Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing; Pericles.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival, seen March 11, 2015

The house is full of high school kids
With robust lungs and sweaty ids,
Enthralled and mystified, they hear
The sweet Bard's lines drown in canned beer,
While I, morose and jaded, think
That Ashland teeters on the brink
Or vulgarizing English lit—
But then, I'd think that, silly twit…

Eastside Road, March 14, 2015—
<big>S</big>O I SCRAWLED on a scrap of paper while enjoying a glass of Champagne at supper after the first play of the day. Shakespeare's weird and inexplicable collisions of violence, injustice, broad humor, transcendent recognition — all of it boiling down to reality, acceptance of reality, mercy, and love — mean more and more to me as I grow older, and teach me ultimately to enjoy and indulge even these noisy kids, who fill the lobby with wobbly high heels and eager tweets before the play, then sit with quiet good behavior and occasional misplaced laughter — at suddenly recognized meaning — as the performance threads its way through another determined director's attempt to render the Bard "relevant" to our time.

Much Ado about Nothing, yet another play about a pair of young lovers thwarted by an unjust dictate, and again presenting the Elizabethan range of classes from nobility to clodhopper, was directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz in the capacious Bowmer Theater, where we sat dead center. The biggest problem with the production, to me, was the decision to cast the role of Don John — the villainous illegitimate brother of Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon; not at all the womanizing Don Juan you may have been thinking of — on a female actor, Regan Linton. (A 2013 graduate of the UC San Diego Acting Program, who uses a wheelchair because of a spinal injury, she makes her OSF debut in this role; I wouldn't be surprised to see her cast as Richard III in a few seasons.)

In fact, Linton is the first character to appear on stage in this production, mute, motionless, and veiled in a dumb-show before the action begins. Blain-Cruz clearly wants the irrational, even violent malevolence of her character to carry equal weight with the wit of the Beatrice-Benedick pair (Christiana Clark and Danforth Comins, both very good) and the broad comedy of Dogberry (Rex Young) and his lunatic crew of watchmen — but the distractions of the wheelchair, and hearing a woman continually addressed as "My lord," weakened that element.

Otherwise, casting worked out well. There was much play of tall and short: Clark is even taller than Comins, and both tower over the romantic couple, Carlo Albàn as Claudio and Leah Anderson as Hero. Jack Willis seemed to me a very sympathetic Leonato, even when gulled by Don John into rejecting his wrongly accused daughter, and minor parts — never really minor in Shakespeare — were well fleshed out.

Harold Bloom calls Much Ado About Nothing Shakespeare's most nihilistic play, reducing love to a game of naughts; but he correctly finds its center on Beatrice's surprising request for proof of Benedick's newly confessed love for her: "Kill Claudio." This comes at the center of the play, which opened with her asking, banteringly, how many of the enemy Benedick had killed in a battle which precedes the play's action. And the play ends with a feigned death, recalling Romeo and Juliet and looking forward to The Winter's Tale. Everything about this play is artificial, symmetrical, contrived; only, as Bloom points out, the language of Beatrice and Benedick rises above contrivance and approaches poetry. (Even in prose, of which there's a fair amount.)

I'm not sure this production trusts that language to carry the play. Scott Bradley's scenic design is striking, and contributes to a surprising coup de théâtre; many of Kara Harmon's costumes add visual interest to their workmanlike efficacy. I've seen worse Shakespeare here in recent seasons.
<big>A</big> VERY DIFFERENT AFFAIR kept us alert in the evening, a rare production of Pericles. Not so much a play as a pageant, I suppose, it had a hard time making its way in the past couple of centuries; I hadn't seen it until two years ago, when the Pasadena company A Noise Within produced it successfully. (And they had done it once before, in 2001, before we began attending their productions.) At that time I wrote about the play generally, on this blog:
…It's one of the four late Romances, with The Tempest, A Winter's Tale, and Cymbeline… These plays extend Shakespeare's oeuvre out of the Elizabethan renaissance toward the Baroque; I think they look forward to Corneille…

One objection to these late romances has been their unbelievability. They depend on sudden rages, incest, redemptions, coincidence, chance natural cataclysms. Pericles begins with a hero who discovers a father-daughter incestuous relationship, and who can believe that? Later, it shows a young virgin abducted and sold into sexual slavery, and who can believe that? Yet in recent years [such] stories have become commonplace. No matter how theatrical and arbitrary his plots — most of them stolen from sources much older, of course — Shakespeare seems unable to escape contemporary relevance.

Asked, after the play, how she would sum it up, the director said that she thinks of it as a man's journey toward grace. In spite of every calamity, Pericles finds resolution. Wife and daughter, each long thought dead, are returned to him. Perseverance is rewarded.
It is generally assumed that Shakespeare did not write the first two acts, which were likely provided by George Wilkins, a lowlife hack (according to Bloom) who was probably a hanger-on at the King's Men, Shakespeare's theater company. In them the young prince Pericles, prince of Tyre, leaves home on a projected voyage-of-entering-manhood; answers a Turandot-like riddle to disclose the king of Antioch's incestuous relationship with his own daughter and escapes with his life; then travels on to the coast of famine-struck Tharus, for no apparent reason but to demonstrate his empathy and largesse.

Next his ship is wrecked in a tremendous storm, and he emerges, looking like Caliban (who in fact he was, in a recent Ashland production of The Tempest ), soon to be welcomed in spite of his ruined clothes to the court of Pentapolis where the king, Simonides, has a beautiful but aloof daughter, Thaisa, a devotée of the goddess Diana, who nonetheless marries Pericles to end the second act.

Shakespeare's hand is immediately recognized in the three acts that follow. Thaisa conceives on her wedding night, but the child is born in the midst of another terrific storm at sea. Thaisa doesn't survive, and the superstitious crew insists she be buried at sea. Those passages are magnificent, recalling the power and exalted futility of the storm in King Lear but proceeding with much more concision.

The baby, Marina, survives, but is taken by pirates and sold into prostitution — a fate she evades through simply the persuasive powers of her innate goodness. Pericles is unaware of these eventualities; assuming Marina as irrevocably lost as Thaisa, he withdraws into a brooding dejection. Ultimately, however, everything comes round.

Pericles continues, I think, Shakespeare's mature expressions of reservations about both Christianity and Judaism. There's something in late Shakespeare that wants to transcend established monotheism: he likes "the quality of mercy," but in the late romances attributes it to a generalized force, personalized in this play by the goddess Diana, but in fact not really a personal quantity at all: an abstraction.

Because we see Shakespeare's plays one at a time we tend to think of them as all coming from a single source. But because so many devices reappear from play to play, especially in these late Romances, it seems to me they are all different stages of a single thing, and that that thing is a thing in flux. Shakespeare is the author of the thirty-seven plays, of course (or 39, or 40) ; but he is also the transition from Ben Jonson to, say, Corneille. In Pericles more than any other late Romance it seems to me he's looking backward to the Elizabethan drama, asking himself if it's possible to retrieve its more eventful, less psychological human drama. Perhaps the box office had asked him to make a last stab at that; perhaps the actors had.

I think he succeeded in that look back, but was content to get on with Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, ultimately to retire, like Prospero, and take up the long big final retrospection.

There were a few little glitches in this production, I think — notably casting the villainous queen Dionyza and the virtuous Thaisa on the same actor, the very good Brooke Parks whose striking face made it hard for me to decide which of these women she truly was. Probably my weakness; no one else's. As I say, she was very good; so was Jennie Greenberry as Marina and (more successfully differentiated) Antiochus's daughter; and so too was Michael J. Hume as Helicanus and, strikingly, in travesty, Bawd, the wife of the owner of the third-act brothel.

Others were evenly successful in the other roles. Best of all, Wayne T. Carr was completely admirable in the title role, growing, aging, developing over the sixteen to twenty years of the play's span, winningly young and energetic and optimistic at first, harrowed and injured at the center, abject and despondent toward the end, to return, through a literal deus ex machina (okay, dea ), to a transcendently ennobled state. There was a majesty to his performance, and it lifted the entire cast and production to a very high level.

Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-73068006250961654252015-03-28T15:42:00.001-07:002015-03-28T15:42:18.668-07:00Bruckner
Eastside Road, March 27, 2015—

•Anton Bruckner : Symphony No. 8 in c minor
James Feddeck, The San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.
Heard March 26 in Davies Hall, San Francisco

<big>L</big>ET ME BE DIRECT : these have been difficult days, because a dear friend is dying, a man who means a great deal to me, for whom I have the greatest respect — I won't go into this further ; the time to write about him hasn't yet arrived.

He has been among a great many other things a performer on the French horn and Wagner tuba, and shares with me an enthusiasm for the symphonies of Anton Bruckner. In fact in his very poignant decline he has managed to keep track of the fact that we had bought, a few weeks ago, tickets to the San Francisco Symphony in order to hear the Bruckner 8th, a particular favorite of his. We discussed this several times on the telephone these last few days. Yesterday was the first day we did not speak on the phone, and was the day we heard the performance. He was in my mind at virtually every moment of the performance.

After the performance we stopped in at a couple of favorite places to refresh ourselves, and I looked at my iPhone. There on Facebook was a comment or two from an acquaintance who had heard the same performance:
What I always find so curious about Bruckner's symphonies is how sophisticated the orchestrations are, and how he uses the forces of the orchestra in novel ways, compared to everything else that was being composed at that time. Where did he get those ideas, considering his very humble and unsophisticated and not-worldly life. Very surprising music from someone with that biography.
In fact, I think it's precisely someone from his background who would envision the utterly new kind of music. (I'll retrench on that remark in just a moment.) Nearly everyone who writes about Bruckner — and a lot has been written ; there are so many things to discuss — nearly every commenter has been a city fellow with a good working knowledge of Western European music history, Haydn through, oh, Stravinsky let's say. Bruckner had quite different roots.

He was a villager, the son of a village schoolmaster, a boy and then a man who was tuned to simple, almost rural life, whose music was primarily church organs and part-songs, who studied serious music relatively late in his life, not writing his first symphony until he was forty years old. He was a man used to walking twenty miles in a day, not for pleasure but to get from one place to another. What he heard, in general, was birdsong and the Mass; and what he saw and felt was large flat expanses in his native Upper Austria.

I've always found Bruckner's symphonies in a very special area of the geography of The Symphony. Haydn's symphonies begin at the countryside court of Esterhazy, mannered, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, yet somewhat isolated. (They end, of course, in Paris and London.) Mozart's begin in Salzburg, a provincial capital, and end in Vienna and Prague, immensely metropolitan. Beethoven's begin, like Haydn's, in a sophisticated backwater (Bonn), but quickly move into a noisy studio in Vienna.

Schubert's begin in a teen-ager's joy in the Viennese streets and ballrooms, but in the early 1820s he caught sight of something beyond, and began to explore it — whatever it was — in piano sonatas and chamber works of much greater scope and dimension than he'd worked with until then. The "Unfinished" and the great C major symphony were the symphonic results of this vision, which brought the symphony beyond its earlier position — a sort of instrumental-music analogy of a novel or a play — to become abstract and geographical, a man-made equivalent of a subcontinent.

There is, I think, a direct line from the expansive Schubert to Bruckner, whose symphonies do not worry at developing arguments out of thematic fragments, as Beethoven had done, but instead announce the existence of huge tracts, celebrating their cordilleras and plains; and beyond Bruckner it is Sibelius who continues that line, removing human desire and personality altogether from the musical discussion, God too, to leave only aural phenomena. Beyond Sibelius I think there is only Cage and Feldman.

Thursday's performance was good. The announced conductor, Semyon Bychkov, withdrew with a couple of weeks' notice, recovering from surgery; his place was taken by James Feddeck, assistant conductor of he Cleveland Orchestra until 2013, when he seems to have launched an international career with a number of orchestras in this country and Europe. He had the Eighth well in hand, leading the orchestra and the audience through the huge architecture with big, sweeping gestures, glancing at the score from time to time but communicating fully with his musicians.

The performance was of the 1890 edition by Leopold Nowak. The only surprises came with the great third-movement Adagio: about two-thirds the way through, in a fairly calm passage, a high string on the second harp broke with a crack. (The score calls for three harps, always playing in unison as I recall; this performance had two.) Then, just as the last chord faded out of the four Wagner tubas, someone's cell phone went off, playing a ditty in the same key, apparently — D flat — quietly, to our ears in the first tier, in a glockenspiel-like timbre: fortunately it was quickly hushed.

(One other note: the score indicates that the famous cymbal crashes in this Adagio are to be played dry, as eighth-notes followed by rests; in this performance as in every other I've heard, live or recorded, the sound was allowed to ring.)

And a final note: the program booklet reprinted a particularly fine note by the late Michael Steinberg, who is particularly good with Bruckner, I think. Just look at the magnificent second sentence in this paragraph describing the composer — a sentence worthy of its subject :
Bruckner himself, a country man transplanted uneasily to the big city in his mid-forties, seemed as out of place as his music. To be sure, he had traveled as an organist, and with stupendous and consistent success; but with his peasant speech, his social clumsiness, those trousers that (it was said) looked as though a carpenter had built them, his disastrous inclination to fall in love with girls of sixteen, his distracting compulsions, his piety (he knelt to pray in the middle of a counterpoint class when he heard the angelus sound from the church next door), a Neanderthal male chauvinism that even his contemporaries found remarkable, and his unawareness of intellectual or political currents of his or any other day, Bruckner was not a likely candidate for success in the sort of compost heap of gossip and intrigue that was Vienna, nor indeed anywhere in a world where a composer's success in mak-ing a living and getting performances depends on so much more than skill at inventing music.
Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-71220163209084578482015-03-19T11:56:00.001-07:002015-03-19T11:56:59.772-07:00Venice and the idea of permanence

•Charles Shere : Venice : and the idea of permanence.
Healdsburg : Ear Press, 2015
ISBN 978-0-990-75889-1
pp. 176  illus.  $16.95
Available : lulu.com, http://tinyurl.com/kzcmj8j

Eastside Road, March 19, 2015—
<big>A</big>S ALL THE WORLD must know by now, I hope, I have written a few books in my life, spurred at various times by small publishers (Fallen Leaf Press, Center for the Book) or, more insidiously, by some small hope of proving myself to my parents and grandparents, who had perhaps an exaggerated opinion of the value of books.

Of course that was a different time. Books were still regarded — I'm perfectly serious here — as having an aura of mysterious authority. Naturally it was known there were cheap or vulgar or even downright mendacious books, but even they contributed to the generally awed attitude toward books, for they were commercialized sinful things. Most books were honorable, appearing regularly in the mail from The Literary Guild or The Book-Of-The-Month Club, with covering pamphlets conveying an Authority's seriously considered and carefully expressed appreciation of the work.

As late as the early years of my own adulthood, in the late 1950s, The Reader's Subscription continued this tradition, bringing Finnegans Wake and Proust and such to our seventy-five-dollars-a-month duplex apartment. And much more recently, and to this day, the Library of America provides me with a two-volume Gertrude Stein, a convenient Wallace Stevens, the novels of Willa Cather and Henry James and Herman Melville.

My own contribution is not worth mentioning in this context, but if you think that's going to stop me, you're wrong. My publication history begins in 1995, after my retirement from journalism, when Berkeley's Fallen Leaf Press brought out Thinking Sound Music, my biography of the composer Robert Erickson, who had been my teacher years before. The next year the same house produced Everbest Ever, a slim jeu d'esprit containing correspondence between the composer Virgil Thomson and four Bay Area friends of his, mostly concerning mundane details of daily life and mutual visits.

I liked working with Fallen Leaf, whose products were nicely designed while indulging some of my own suggestions, and whose publisher, Ann Basart, was indulgent in the extreme of my eccentricities of prose style. In fact you could say she spoiled me: and this, together with intrinsic laziness, is why with one exception all my other titles have been self-published. (Regrettably, Fallen Leaf Press went out of business ten years ago or so, but those two books live on at Rowman & Littlefield.)

The most recent to appear is the one depicted here, Venice: and the idea of permanence, printed, like nine previous titles, at the online publishing company Lulu.com. For reasons some of which will be obvious, I think online self-publishing can transcend the conventional classification of "vanity press." I think it is, rather, an instance of a new corner of the capitalist economy, one merging artisanship, small business, niche market, and global technology, and facilitating an individual producer's seeing his work through the various steps of creation, production, and even distribution according to his own taste and values.

For example : I like a little space before a full colon, as you have just seen. I even like it before semi-colons. And I like a double space, or a space and a half, after full stops. I just think a printed page is more easily read with such spaces : and designing my own book makes it possible for me to insist on this practice, which, I think, no commercial publisher would countenance.

But that's only one reason for my self-publishing habit. Years writing for a newspaper — and in those days that meant writing thousands of words a week — formed the habit of considering experience through a linkage of fingertips and the mind and memory. I enjoy so many aspects of daily life — admittedly not shrinking from enhancing daily life with good food and drink, with travel, with reading, conversation, and the contemplation of art — but I enjoy them more fully when I consider them.

Early in the Internet Age, when e-mail became generally available, I began to share these considerations and contemplations with a few friends who seemed to enjoy reading them. By the time of our first month-long stay in Venice, in the summer of 2001, the list had grown to over a hundred, and hotel Internet providers had begun to suspect me, limiting the number I could send these "travel dispatches" to. But many of my readers, though they could deal with e-mail for some reason, resisted subscribing to a blog : and anyhow the blog itself had begun to develop associations with vanity. (Since then, of course, it has attained a more honorable state.)

Enter Lulu.com and the idea of online publishing. The present subject, Venice : and the idea of permanence records impressions gathered during two month-long stays in La Serenissima, in June 2001 and May 2011. I was curious to see how my thinking, my observation, and Venice herself may have changed in the lapse of those ten years, but I certainly wan't about to apply literary criticism to myself — why not just gather the original items in a single volume and let the reader, if one should happen to appear, come to his own conclusions?

So here it is. The cover's in color, as you see, but the interior photos are in black and white. There have been three previous similar gatherings, Roman Letters, Mostly Spain, and Improvised Itineraries, the last of which covers walking in the Low Countries and driving across France. (Another, Walking the French Alps, records a month-long hike from Lake Geneva to Nice.

I prepare these books on my desktop Macintosh, laying out the pages (and, separately, the covers) using Apple's "Pages" word-processor, converting the results to .pdf files, and uploading them to Lulu. They take over from there. I suppose each book takes me a month or so of work (apart from the writing), a few hours at a time — and, since I'm by nature careless, a number of trial printings. I set the price myself — let me know if you think it too high! — in order to make a very modest profit from the sale of each copy. If I like the result, and I generally do, its simple presence on my bookshelf is reward enough.

If something displeases me in the final result, I have only myself to blame.Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-12830056874148318292015-03-08T22:20:00.001-07:002015-03-09T11:04:27.573-07:00Recently heard

•Charles Ives: The Unanswered Question.
•Darius Milhaud: La création du monde, op. 81.
•Jean Sibelius: Luonnotar, op. 70.
•Thomas Adès: In Seven Days.
 Thomas Adès, San Francisco Symphony; Dawn Upshaw, soprano; Kirill Gerstein, piano; Tal Rosner, video artist
 Heard March 6, 2015, in Davies Hall, San Francisco

Eastside Road, March 8, 2015—
<big>O</big>N PAPER, as the cliché goes, the concert program was very attractive, attractive enough to suggest a couple of hours driving to hear it. And in retrospect I'm glad we did: but in the event the evening could have profited from more expressive conducting. The conducting composer is one of the problems (by far not the biggest!) attending contemporary orchestral music. I can see why composers contribute to the problem: it's a living; undoubtedly a better one than composing. It's a sad fact that the creators of music are rarely rewarded as well as their interpreters. But a couple of recent experiences have led me to believe really fine conductors deserve their rewards; they bring something to the concert hall their part-time colleagues rarely seem able to supply.

The program in question was thematic: all four compositions address the concept spelled out in Milhaud's title, and suggested in Adès's: the creation of the world. That was an intriguing idea, particularly when expressed by two of my favorite pieces from the previous century and two more that I'm unfamiliar with. Ives;s The Unanswered Question is of course well known. It calls for a string ensemble, preferably unseen, which drones quietly away on slowly changing chords suggesting some kind of ethereal process. A solo trumpet plays a slow five-note call whose pitch contour and rhythm suggests
What - is the An-swer?
, repeating the call without variation a number of times; each time the call is answered by a quartet of flutes playing increasingly more discordant, strident responses. Ives had a program in mind: the strings represent "the silences of the Druids, who know, see, and hear nothing"; the trumpet repeats "the perennial question of existence"; the flutes are the "fighting answerers" who, as Jan Swafford writes in the useful book Charles Ives: a Life with Music,"for all their sound and fury, get nowhere." (The Ives quotes are from Swafford's book, where they are unattributed.)

In this performance the strings were backstage, conducted by Christian Baldini, and barely audible. The solo trumpet (uncredited in the program!) stood downstage center in the traditional soloist's position and played, commendably, from memory; Adès stood nearby to direct the flute ensemble, standing (good! not sitting!) upstage left. The performance was, I think, the most satisfying of the evening: Ives does nearly all the work with his score.

I would have thought La création du monde nearly as foolproof, but in spite of fine instrumental and ensemble playing this performance seemed dull. I don't think this is the necessary result of playing the piece in a big concert hall, though of course that doesn't help. Milhaud scored his haunting, poignant ballet score, commissioned by the Paris-based Ballets suédois, for an unusual combination: according to the useful article on Wikipedia, reduced winds including an alto saxophone, one French horn, two trumpets and one trombone, and four strings: two violins, a cello and a double-bass; with a large percussion section including tambourine, four drums, five timpani, piano, cymbal, anvil and wood block.

Milhaud's twenty-minute score is in six sections, with prominent solo roles for saxophone, clarinet, and double-bass. The music is heavily influenced by Milhaud's enthusiasm for the (mostly black) American jazz he'd heard in New York in 1920, and the instrumentation probably suggests the pick-up theater orchestras prevailing in that milieu and vaudeville. (Ives was similarly influenced; there's an interesting affinity between Ives and Milhaud, who both excel at integrating vernacular and "high-art" musical styles.)

While La création du monde is narrative and suggestive, clearly written for choreography, it is also contrapuntal and even oddly austere, a parallel I think to the sober browns and muted colors, the arbitrary and abstraction-oriented geometry of Braque and Picasso at the peak of Cubism. Its effect depends on the sonorities of its instrumental writing and the energy of its rhythms, but also on the structural, architectural quality of its construction, which must not be neglected in favor of surface color and "expressivity." I was concerned before the piece began, listening to the saxophonist warming up and pracising his vibrato, and alas I was right to have worried: the performance was like fine dancers being sacrificed to the novelty of their costumes.

But then Sibelius's Luonnotar ! What a marvelous piece! Composed in 1913 (halfway between The Unanswered Question and La création du monde ) and scored for full orchestra (winds in pairs, normal brass, but two sets of timpani and two harps), it is a demanding scène dramatique or concert aria for solo soprano, to a text from the Finnish epic the Kalevala, again addressing the creation of the world. Luonnotar is — again I rely on Wikipedia — "the Spirit of Nature and Mother of the Seas," a virgin daughter of Air who after seven centuries' ceaseless swimming in Ocean gives birth, by charitably offering rest to a similarly restlessly flying teal, to heaven, moon, and stars.

Sibelius "portrays" all this through his characteristically restless rhythms containing hard-edged, brittle themes, with the surging power of lower strings and winds and the bright icy sparkle of high winds and percussion. And against this, always, the soprano, whose very difficult role involves every corner of a two-octave tessitura, a command of Finnish consonants (and vowels, of course), and the ability to maintain presence within a full orchestra even while singing quietly.

This was the best performance of the evening, completely persuasive, largely because of Dawn Upshaw's glowing power and unflappable presence. The orchestra played well, with contained strength and focus, and Adès shaped and controlled the flow of the music carefully and expressively.

After the intermission we heard Adès's piano concerto, In Seven Days, composed in 2008, a century after the Ives. In seven connected sections the piece addresses the traditional Judeo-Christian seven-day Creation myth, less persuasively, I think, than Milhaud's "primitive" version or Sibelius's exotic pagan one. On the one hearing, in the back of the balcony seating, I had a hard time hearing either sonic details or structural units. The piano clattered away; the orchestra played smoothly and without much articulation; at the back of the orchestra, cartoonlike images played with a nine-section grid, suggesting Walt Disney collaborating with Pong. Sea and Sky emerged from Chaos, I read din the program; Land, Grass and Trees appeared, likewise Stars, Sun, and Moon; a couple of fugues accompanied the appearance of animal life; and the piece ended in Contemplation, as the concert had begun. Like Ives's flutes, Adès's forces seemed to me to get nowhere.

•Charles Amirkhanian: Dumbok Bookache; Ka Himeni Hehena; Marathon.
•Errollyn Wallen: The Errollyn Wallen Songbook.
•Pauline Oliveros: Twins Peeking at Koto.
•Don Byron: pieces for his ensemble.
 The composers, with the Del Sol String Quartet; Frode Haltli, accordion; Miya Masaoka, koto; and the Don Byron ensemble
 Heard March 7, 2015, at the Other Minds Festival; San Francisco Jazz Center

<big>T</big>HAT WAS A RICH night in the vicinity of Davies Hall: Sarah Cahill was, unknown to us, playing music by Terry Riley on the same block; Other Minds was opening its 20th annual festival down the street. We returned the next evening to hear the second Other Minds concert. Other Minds is an annual assembly of internationally prominent (or in some cases not so prominent) composers who gather for a few days of conversation and show-and-tell, then attend a series of concerts in which each presents music to a generally young and attentive audience (including, of course, the composers themselves). (I should mention here that I was one of the group in 1996, in the third annual OM festival.)

Other Minds is directed by the Bay Area composer and factotum Charles Amirkhanian, who, because he turns 70 this year, chose this year to include his own music on each of the festival's three evenings. This is not as arrogant an act as it may seem: his work is modest, humorous, and unpretentious, and serves well as an opening act. The three selections last night were "text-sound" pieces for speaking voice (Amirkhanian), spoken live over a pre-recorded background of other spoken lines (still Amirkhanian) and percussion.

The source is Ernst Toch's Dada Fuge aus der Geographie, composed for speaking chorus in 1930 or so, and the source is not far except in years. I think Amirkhanian's sound-text pieces would gain from greater diversity of voice: the composer's baritone is clear and pleasant, but grows wooly when redoubled and -tripled electronically.

Errolyn Wallen was a new personality to me, but is apparently well enough known; born in Belize, she was moved to London at the age of two, and has developed a considerable career in the UK. She has a strong clear focussed soprano voice and considerable chops as a pianist — at one point, in one of the seven songs she presented, her piano technique suggested she'd be at home in Ives's Concord Sonata. Her songs occasionally brought his to mind, too, with their constant references to a vernacular, even commercial style, and the directness (not to say naïvety) of their verbal and musical content. When they're light-hearted, as in "What's Up Doc?," they're engaging; when they reach toward emotional seriousness they grow too sentimental for my taste. All of them were with only her own piano accompaniment except the last, "Daedalus," accompanied by piano and string quartet — here, the Del Sol Quartet, with a substitute for first violinist Kate Stenberg.

The concert shifted gears after intermission. Pauline Oliveros brought a new work, for two accordions and koto, perhaps twenty minutes long, full of surprising beauty, with silences, a great dynamic range, an enormous range of instrumental color, and the composer's characteristic good humor — a piece full of heart and invention, occasionally hearkening back to the avant-garde of the 1960s: I thought I heard Robert Erickson's sunny straightforward "experimentalism" channeled in a sudden upwelling near the center of the piece), and the totally accepting state of mind, eager to explore any kind of sound and allow it its place, confirmed Oliveros's place alongside that of John Cage.

Then the clarinetist Don Byron came on, with his ensemble: John Betsch, drums; Cameron Brown, bass; Aruán Ortiz, piano. Their improvisations, over charts, were supple, witty, resourceful, and engaging — a throwback in spirit, though stylistically more advanced I think, to the "third stream" music that tried to negotiate between chamber jazz and avant-garde concert music fifty years ago. (When Byron played his clarinet into the sounding-board of the open Steinway it was impossible not to think of Mort Subotnick back at Mills College in the 1960s.)

Where the first half of the concert had shown awareness, intelligence, and skill, this second half was all artfulness and vision. It closed a pair of musical evenings on a note of pure pleasure. Charles Sherehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com